South Africa’s AI policy cited fake research, created by AI: what lessons need to be learned
South Africa’s AI policy cited fake research, created by AI: what lessons need to be learned
Publish Date: 2026-04-29 11:06:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
South Africa’s first attempt to establish a binding artificial intelligence (AI) policy framework came to an abrupt halt just 16 days after it was officially gazetted.
On 10 April, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published the Draft South Africa National Artificial Intelligence Policy for public comment.
Journalists checked the references and found that they contained fabrications. These fell into two categories: academic journals that do not exist; and real journals in which the referenced research articles were never published.
Read more:
AI policies in Africa: lessons from Ghana and Rwanda
Such fabrications are typical of a known generative AI problem called hallucination.
Withdrawing the draft, the communications minister was frank: the problem was not a technical glitch but a failure of oversight. Generative AI was used without proper human verification of the sources, compromising the credibility and integrity of the document.
Much of the public commentary has treated this as an embarrassment: the policy meant to govern AI was itself undermined by AI.
As a senior lecturer in cyber law, including the regulation of AI, I argue that framing this episode as an embarrassment obscures what needs to be examined. It misses the main point of what is at stake.
The hallucinated citations reveal two specific failures. Epistemic integrity (the assurance that research has been conducted through reliable, ethical and repeatable methods that any reader could verify) was absent. So was information integrity (the public’s reasonable expectation that information from an authoritative source can be trusted).
The policy was not equipped to govern either of these failures, and has now itself demonstrated both. This matters because generative AI can be harmful, and its harms are not limited to fake references, but also include fake images, fake videos, fake voices, and the weaponisation of…
