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Alaska's top education official used AI to draft a state-wide school policy on cell phone use, and the chatbot cited multiple phony studies.
Education Commissioner Deena Bishop admitted to using generative AI to draft the resolution, the Alaska Beacon reports. The document, which was posted online before a state board of education meeting, includes six citations as supporting evidence for a proposal that urges the Department of Education and Early Development to ban cell phones during class hours.
Four of those citations are studies that do not exist, the Alaska Beacon says. The organizations that allegedly published them, including the American Psychological Association and Pew Research Center, are real, but the titles cited in the document are not discoverable online.
In one example, the document claims "a longitudinal study from the American Psychological Association (2019) supports" efforts to restrict cell phone usage in the classroom. But there is no such study; the references section links to a different study that doesn't mention phones.
Another phony citation says the Journal of Educational Psychology published a study in 2017 that found cell phones harm learning retention, but it links to an unrelated study on teacher burnout. Another claims to show that banning phones improves student performance but links to a study on sexualized adolescent behavior on Facebook.
The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development (DEED) tells PCMag it was "exploring the uses of AI" as a first draft, and it immediately discarded it after noticing the false citations. Someone in the department posted it online accidentally because the document had the "correct look." It was then taken down and replaced with the correct version, which the board voted to adopt.
"We do not and have not used AI to create any department documents," says DEED.
The incident is "worthy of a TV sitcom," writes the Alaska Daily News editorial board, in that Bishop used technology improperly, with the goal of preventing others from doing the same. Her "citation-fabrication faux pas...displays a lack of maturity in the ways we use artificial intelligence — even at the highest levels of our government."
Real studies have found cell phones impede student comprehension among college students and are a major distraction in the classroom. It's unclear why the chatbot hallucinated its own studies rather than referencing existing ones.
Using AI for serious documents is a risky move. In 2023, for example, a lawyer faced sanctions for submitting a legal brief with fake citations made up by ChatGPT. Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, also reportedly used Google Bard (now Gemini) to help compose a legal document that landed in front of a federal judge.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls hallucinations an "unsolved problem," and admits large language models are not great at "factuality."
Editors' Note: This story has been updated with comment from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.