AI just tried to take our jobs. It failed.
In a Nutshell
Deloitte charged governments $290K in Australia and $1.6M in Canada for reports riddled with fake citations and fabricated quotes, yet stood by their conclusions despite the academic fraud. An MIT study tested major AIs on 11,000 real job tasks, finding they deliver minimally sufficient work only 65% of the time and never exceed a 50% success rate for superior output, performing worst on skilled jobs like law and analysis. AI is overhyped autocomplete—not AGI—and can't replace humans, only assisting with boring tasks while lacking true understanding or regret.
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A government researcher in Canberra, Australia, is reading a 237-page report on welfare compliance in an office with fluorescent lighting. His government paid consulting firm Deloitte $290,000 for this report. He notices a suspicious citation, Googles it, and finds the paper doesn't exist. He checks more citations—all non-existent. He finds a direct quote attributed to a federal judge, but the judge never said it. Deloitte made it up. The government paid a quarter of a million dollars for academically speaking fanfiction.
Deloitte's official statement: "the updates made in no way impact the substantive content findings and recommendations in the report." They're saying the evidence is completely fake, but the conclusions are real.
A few weeks later, Deloitte does the same in Canada for a $1.6 million healthcare report. A professor in Nova Scotia opens the report and sees her own name listed as an author on a paper she has never seen. When asked, Deloitte said, "We firmly stand behind the recommendations put forward in this report."
This is not just a Deloitte problem. MIT gave AI a thorough performance review: tested every major AI model on 11,000 tasks from real jobs, humans graded them. MIT's conclusion: AI produced minimally sufficient work 65% of the time. For superior work, AI never cracked 50%—absolute ceiling for excellent AI work is a coin flip.
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