Incident 915: Alaska Education Department Reportedly Published Policy Featuring Erroneous AI-Generated Citations

Description: In October 2024, Alaska’s Education Commissioner Deena Bishop allegedly used generative AI to draft a school cellphone policy, resulting in reportedly fabricated citations of non-existent studies. The document, which did not disclose AI use, was shared with the state Board of Education, and despite reported corrections, AI-generated errors remained in the final resolution.

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Alleged: Unspecified large language model developers developed an AI system deployed by Alaska Department of Education and Early Development and Deena Bishop, which harmed Alaskan education policymakers , Alaskan students , Alaskan parents of students , Alaskan education system and Alaska Board of Education members.

Alleged implicated AI system: Unspecified large language models

Incident Stats

Incident ID

915

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-10-28

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

False citations show Alaska education official relied on generative AI, raising broader questions • Alaska Beacon

alaskabeacon.com

alaskabeacon.com · 2024

The state’s top education official relied on generative artificial intelligence to draft a proposed policy on cellphone use in Alaska schools, which resulted in a state document citing supposed academic studies that don’t exist.

The documen…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.