Purportedly AI-Assisted Report by Tromsø Officials Allegedly Cited Non-Existent Sources in School Closure Proposal

February 13, 2025

In February 2025, Tromsø Municipality presented a controversial report proposing school and kindergarten closures. Upon closer inspection, residents discovered that the report contained numerous non-existent sources, which officials admitted were generated by an AI tool. This incident sparked public outcry and ultimately led to the suspension of the closure plan. This case underscores the need for trustworthy AI practices, particularly in the public sector. For those interested in shaping safe and secure AI governance, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to map and measure such incidents.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.671, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.651, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.647, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: tromso-municipality, stig-tore-johnsen
Alleged developer: unknown-large-language-model-developers
Alleged harmed parties: thomas-nordahl, general-public-of-tromso, general-public-of-norway

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1009

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.