GPTZero Flags 31 Hallucinated Citations Across Accenture Papers

GPTZero says it found 31 hallucinated citations among 245 references across three papers connected to Accenture, according to its investigation. The documents include a policy paper produced with professors from IE University and two arXiv papers written by Accenture researchers.

GPTZero used its Hallucination Detector to identify the citations and said human reviewers verified each one. The investigation also identified eight citations with major errors that did not meet its definition of a hallucination, including changed titles and incorrect author lists.

One flagged reference linked to a fake GitHub repository for the malicious chatbot FraudGPT that contained malware before its deletion. GPTZero also listed claims in the policy paper that it believes are fake, including country rankings attributed to the 2023 Oxford Insights AI Readiness Index.

GPTZero said its detection tools do not definitively prove that language models generated the documents or citations, but provide significant circumstantial evidence. The two arXiv papers were not official Accenture publications, but their authors used Accenture email addresses and affiliations, and code for one paper was stored in Accenture's official GitHub organization. The report does not include a response from Accenture.