Two Home Affairs officials suspended after AI ‘hallucinations’ found in policy paper

AI hallucinations were found in the Department of Home Affairs’ revised white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection.

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is the latest arm of government to have discovered the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in one of its policy papers.

The department on Thursday announced the suspension of two officials associated with a key policy document that recently underwent a revision.

One official suspended on Thursday is the Chief Director of the citizenship and immigration unit, with the suspension of the director involved in drafting the document to be effected at the start of the new week.

DHA acknowledged the “embarrassment caused” and stated it would use the incident as a way to modernise its processes.

“Moving forward, the department will also design and implement AI checks and declarations as part of its internal approval processes,” the department stated.

Policy reviews incoming

The discrepancies discovered by the department relate to the reference list attached to the revised white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection.

These references were deemed to have been “hallucinations”, the term used to describe erroneous or fictitious large language model outputs that occur due to a lack of credible data.

“It seems that these references were generated and attached to the document after the fact, as they are not cited in the body of the text.

“In addition to implementing precautionary suspensions, the department has appointed two independent law firms to respectively manage the disciplinary process and review all policy documents produced by the department dating back to 30 November 2022,” DHA stated.

The review date was chosen as this was the period when the first large language model – ChatGPT – was released for public use.

‘Adapt to keep up’

The suspensions come a week after the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) was forced to withdraw its own policy document on AI.

As with DHA, ficticious sources and citations were found to be present in the draft National AI Policy.

“The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. This should not have happened,” stated Minister Solly Malatsi.

The draft AI policy is set to be reworked, with the DHA also withdrawing the reference list attached to its document.

However, DHA maintains that the revised policy on citizenship, immigration and refugees “continues to accurately reflect the government’s position”, and stands by its contents.

“These measures came about through an extensive process of cross-departmental collaboration and public consultation, and are not materially affected by the apparent AI hallucinations contained in the standalone reference list,” DHA confirmed.

The department accepted AI’s growing use in society and said institutions should work harder to properly harness its benefits.

“It is a transformative but disruptive technology that is changing how organisations operate across the private and public sectors. We must now adapt to keep up,” DHA concluded.