Alaska Education Department Reportedly Published Policy Featuring Erroneous AI-Generated Citations

October 28, 2024

In October 2024, a controversy emerged when Alaska’s Education Commissioner Deena Bishop was accused of utilizing generative AI to draft a school cellphone policy. The resulting document, which did not disclose its AI-assisted creation, reportedly contained fabricated citations of non-existent studies. Despite reported corrections, these errors persisted in the final resolution, emphasizing the importance of safeguards and governance in AI usage for harm prevention.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.656, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 4.2 — similarity 0.655, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.1 — similarity 0.651, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: alaska-department-of-education-and-early-development, deena-bishop
Alleged developer: unknown-large-language-model-developers
Alleged harmed parties: alaskan-education-policymakers, alaskan-students, alaskan-parents-of-students, alaskan-education-system, alaska-board-of-education-members

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/915

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.