Google Bard Allegedly Generates False Allegations Against Consulting Firms Used in Research Presented in Australian Parliamentary Inquiry

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Misinformation (False or misleading information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case in Australia.

• Australian Voluntary AI Safety Standard Australia · Voluntary standard · guidance
• Australian mandatory guardrails proposal Australia · Under consultation · guidance
• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025) Kazakhstan · Adopted · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 2 Nov 2023
   Australian academics apologise for false AI-generated allegations against big four consultancy firms

   theguardian.com · Henry Belot

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

James Guthrie

Alleged developer

Google Bard

Alleged harmed party

James Guthrie, James Guthrie'S Co Authors, Parliament Of Australia, Kpmg, Deloitte

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Misinformation

Risk subdomain

3.1 False or misleading information

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

none

Sectors

law enforcement, information and communication

Countries

AU

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 3.1.

• Pursuing Consistent Context

  "LLMs have been demonstrated to pursue consistent context [129]–[132], which may lead to erroneous generation when the prefixes contain false information. Typical examples include sycophancy [129], [130], false demonstra...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Defective Decoding Process

  In general, LLMs employ the Transformer architecture [32] and generate content in an autoregressive manner, where the prediction of the next token is conditioned on the previously generated token sequence. Such a scheme...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Noisy Training Data

  "Another important source of hallucinations is the noise in training data, which introduces errors in the knowledge stored in model parameters [111]–[113]. Generally, the training data inherently harbors misinformation....

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Hallucinations

  "LLMs generate nonsensical, untruthful, and factual incorrect content"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Faithfulness Errors

  "The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is is not true to the source material or input used

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Factuality Errors

  "The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is factually incorrect

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Untruthful Content

  "The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Knowledge Gaps

  "Since the training corpora of LLMs can not contain all possible world knowledge [114]–[119], and it is challenging for LLMs to grasp the long-tail knowledge within their training data [120], [121], LLMs inherently posse...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 12 May 2026Nonfiction Book 'The Future of Truth' Reportedly Included AI-Generated and Misattributed Quotations
• 6 May 2026Claude Console Reportedly Generated Phantom Legal Quotations in Trump Layoffs Court Filing
• 21 Apr 2026Purportedly AI-Enhanced Images of Iranian Women Protesters Were Reportedly Spread With Unverified Execution Claims
• 10 Apr 2026South Africa Draft National AI Policy Reportedly Included Fictitious References Believed to Be AI Hallucinations
• 8 Apr 2026Purportedly AI-Generated Image Reportedly Misled Daejeon Authorities Searching for Escaped Wolf Neukgu
• 17 Mar 2026Gemini and Grok Reportedly Misidentified Authentic Minab School-Strike Graveyard Photo as Unrelated Disaster Imagery