PwC, one of the “Big Four” consulting firms, has been caught red-handed publishing “thought leadership” reports about AI riddled with lazy and easily-spotted hallucinations.
As the Financial Times reports, four reports published between 2024 and 2026, were meant to solicit consulting work for partners in the Middle East. But as investigators from AI detector firm GPTZero found, the reports were an utter mess, chock full of “hallucinated (vibe) citations, fabricated claims, and incomprehensible drafting and formatting decisions.”
The offending reports contained “claims that are unrelated to or contradicted by the cited source.” For instance, a 2025 report included an entire section about a framework known as “Citizen Pulse,” which it alleged was being deployed by governments around the world. However, GPTZero found that the framework didn’t actually exist and was entirely hallucinated by an AI, including supporting citations.
The findings highlight just how pervasive AI hallucinations have become, from lawyers being reprimanded by judges after being caught including fake legal citations in court documents to entire academic fields being inundated with dubious AI-generated papers.
