By now, you’ve seen the news about the report Deloitte produced for the Australian government that contained numerous errors because it was generated by AI without a human checking its output first. Matt Levine offered his views on the matter:
“If I ran a consulting firm I would be very interested in simultaneously:
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- Making sure that my consultants were really good and creative and cutting-edge about using AI to do consulting; and
- Making sure that their work product was highly differentiated from the raw output of large language models. If I was charging clients hundreds of thousands of dollars to answer a question like ‘how can we increase sales of our widgets,’ I would be very very careful to give them answers that were not simply what you’d get by typing the same question into ChatGPT.”
His soul-crushing warning – engaging professional consulting/advisory services doesn’t inherently exclude AI risks:
“’Well if we just type our question into ChatGPT we’ll get a decent answer, but it might contain hallucinations, whereas if we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a big consulting firm we can at least avoid that risk,’ you might think, incorrectly.”
And it isn’t just consultants who lean too heavily on AI – lawyers do too. John Jenkins pointed out this ruling from the Supreme Court, New York County, wherein the judge stated:
“This case adds yet another unfortunate chapter to the story of artificial intelligence misuse in the legal profession. Here, Defendants’ counsel not only included an AI-hallucinated citation and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of this motion for sanctions, but also included multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in Defendants’ brief opposing this motion. In other words, counsel relied upon unvetted AI—in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues—to defend his use of unvetted AI.”
AI is everywhere in sustainability, although perhaps no more than in any other facet of business these days. You owe it to your company to meaningfully drill into consultant expertise, original thinking and their level of reliance on AI to make sure you aren’t simply paying for repackaged output from chatGPT and the associated risks of errors and omissions.
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