Associated Incidents
In Tromsø, in northern Norway, the local administration decided it had too many schools and kindergartens for too few children, and they should shut some of them down. So they prepared a very nice 120-page report to support this move. [NRK, in Norwegian; Tromsø Municipality, in Norwegian; report, PDF in Norwegian]
The shutdown plan upset local residents. They thought the city's excuses for the closures were ad-hoc and the council kept making different excuses at different times. [NRK, in Norwegian]
So the locals got the report and checked it over --- and found that a pile of the sources cited in the report ... didn't exist. [NRK, in Norwegian]
Stig Johnsen, the municipal director, admitted the report was written with AI. Of 18 references in the report, only seven actually exist. "We discovered multiple errors, which we deeply regret."
One reference was to a book: "Quality in School: Learning, Well-being and Relationships" by Thomas Nordahl. This book doesn't exist.
Professor Nordahl told NRK: "I've been quoted and misinterpreted before, but I've never been quoted before on something I never wrote."
Commentators are calling this "perhaps the first major AI scandal in the Norwegian public sector."
The mayor, Gunnar Wilhelmsen, was "shocked," you understand, and is very clear that the administration is to blame.
Johnsen says he "deeply regretted" the administration error --- that is, just getting a chatbot to make up excuses for their plan. The shutdown plan has been halted for now. They'll start again later this year.
Update: Karianne Tung, Norway's Minister for Digitalisation, has posted to LinkedIn congratulating Tromsø on using AI at all, and tries to use this AI failure and scandal as evidence AI is good actually. [LinkedIn]