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…
The communications minister said there would be consequences for those responsible for drafting the policy…
A study published in the journal Nature found that over 2.5 per cent of academic papers published in 2025 contained at least one potentially hallucinated citation, compared to just 0.3 per cent in 2024. That amounts to over 110,000 papers published in 2025 containing invalid references, “hallucinated” by AI.
I am debugging a larger program to build a video game. Claude and I are restructuring the code. This means I give Claude information, and the AI crystallizes a new plan to tackle the job. Then I give it another piece of code, and AI says, “Oh, that changes things”. Then again and again till all of the different aspects are worked out with Claude, then, “I finally have the full picture, here is what we need to do”.
Next, I want to save my old code. Claude and I beat that to death four times. I am trying to catch up with the reams of suggestions. Finally, Claude gives me options again for the fourth time, and says, “I need to be firm here…”, “You might need to sleep on it”.
My point
If you catch Claude in the process of crystallizing a response with less than full input on the dynamics involved, you get the wrong answer.
Yes, the AI policy written in AI was lazy. It takes time and effort to hammer out complex things with AI.
If a teenager is anxious and does not know themselves, that is dangerous territory for AI. A hammer is more likely to hit your thumb than the nail on the head. It is just a tool.
How human! A lot of these AI articles are written as if humans never erred or hallucinated. Humans invented the Scientific Method precisely to weed out errors and hallucinations. Intelligence is mostly recalling relevant information via pattern matching but it does not guarantee correctness. Weeding out the wrong stuff is the Scientific Method’s job.