The world’s biggest consultancies are selling companies expensive advice on how to adopt AI without getting burned. Their own reports keep getting burned.
PwC is the latest to be caught. Four of its Middle East “thought leadership” reports were a mess, the Financial Times reported. The reports, on AI and electric vehicles, carried fake footnotes, misattributed claims and made-up sources. The research group GPTZero flagged the errors as AI hallucinations, and the FT verified them.
A footnote that ended in ‘chatgpt.com’ #
The giveaways were not subtle. One report cited a PwC survey claiming 70% of Middle East chief executives expect generative AI to reshape their business. The footnote linked to a news article that never mentioned the survey. Another footnote’s web address still carried the tag “utm_source=chatgpt.com.”
“The chaotic signposting of source material is symptomatic of AI-generated research,” GPTZero’s Paul Esau told the FT. This is a firm that markets itself as an adviser on using AI responsibly, including how to avoid exactly these errors.
All four, now #
PwC is not alone. It completes an unwanted set. GPTZero’s earlier work pushed KPMG to pull an October report. It had made false claims about AI use at UBS, the UK’s NHS and Transport for London. EY retracted a study last month over fake footnotes. Deloitte has twice slipped AI fabrications into government reports, including a $1.6m health plan in Canada that cited papers which do not exist.
The pattern repeats each time. The Big Four have pumped out hundreds of AI thought-leadership pieces to win clients, while pushing their own staff to use AI to work faster. The result is AI slop with a blue-chip logo on it.
Do as we say #
The timing is almost too neat. The same week, PwC’s US chief executive Paul Griggs was telling Business Insider where companies go wrong with AI. One trap he named was bolting it onto broken processes.
“All AI is going to do for you is tell you how bad your messy process really is,” Griggs said. His own firm just proved him right.
Marking their own homework #
The awkward part is what it says about the product. These firms charge premium rates for judgment and rigour. Yet no one appears to have checked whether the sources were real. It is the same gap that lets AI-written code ship with security holes: the output looks right, so nobody looks closer.
It also cuts against the sales pitch. Consultants are among the loudest voices telling clients AI will transform their work. Their own reports show how it can quietly corrupt it, and how the hype outruns the safe use. The hallucinations are the tell, and a detector keeps finding them. The firms keep publishing anyway.
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