Communications minister, Solly Malatsi, withdrew the draft policy after finding that at least 6 of its 67 academic citations were AI-generated hallucinations that cited journal articles that don’t exist.

Setting aside the issue of where the text came from was appropriate, human or computer or what, I also kind of feel like the legislators and legal people involved should be...you know, doing a careful reading of the actual legislation before it goes to the public for comments.

One thing that I have wondered based on the steady flow of cases in which lawyers

not just in South Africa

have been shown to be using hallucinated text, meaning that they were just feeding stuff into some LLM and using the output, is how much legal text prior to LLMs showing up was basically just copy-pasted from other random documents authored by someone else, with lawyers not really doing the expected work themselves of ensuring that the text was appropriate. Or dumping work that is supposed to be done by a lawyer on some paralegal and signing off on it, or something like that. I mean, LLMs are probably an appealing way to half-ass doing legal text, but they also probably aren't the first way to cut corners.

It wasn't just written by AI, it was badly written and quoting sources that don't exist

"The draft rules also outlined plans for tax ⁠breaks, grants, and subsidies to encourage private-sector collaboration in building AI infrastructure in the country."

This is proof that you do not need the Skynet-like AI to be intelligent, conscious, or even have genuine self-interest, in order for it to basically act in exactly the same way as if it did. The paper clip machine is here