‘Pretty shoddy’: Prof says N.B. education plan attributes to him an article that doesn’t seem to exist

Vincent Geiger wasn’t especially surprised to learn his work had been misattributed in New Brunswick’s 12-year education plan for the anglophone schools sector. 

The professor of mathematics education at Australian Catholic University said it has happened before.

But in this case, he finds the way the plan references some academic work “pretty shoddy” for a government document. 

Geiger’s research in the field of numeracy is cited twice in the education plan, which is meant to lay the foundation of the province’s public education system from now to 2038.

The professor gets an entry on the document’s reference list, but the article attributed to him doesn’t seem to exist, and Geiger said he’s never heard of the journal where the article is supposed to have been published.

“It’s a bit of a mishmash of things I have worked on in the past,” he said in an interview with CBC News.

“It’s as if something has just dredged through my records and picked out bits and pieces from the articles themselves rather than the title.” 

Questions raised about N.B.’s 12-year Anglophone education plan

Geiger suspects artificial intelligence may have played a role.

“If that’s what they’re doing now, it’s not a scholarly approach,” Geiger said. 

“It’s hardly an approach that would be adopted by a credible journalist. So I don’t know why or how people working for governments and certainly education departments are taking that approach.”

His isn’t the only work to be misattributed in the document. 

William Jeynes is an education professor and researcher at the California State University, Long Beach. His name also gets a spot on the plan’s reference list, but the article attributed to him, while in his field of study, was written by someone else.

“Maybe grieved is too strong a word, or maybe that’s not strong enough,” he told CBC News. 

“What I find most disturbing is, this is not the first time I have encountered this. I’ve seen this on student papers that I know have used AI.”

The education plan accurately represents the content of his research in the body of the text, Jeynes said, but errors related to attribution and a seeming lack of fact-checking before publication are much more serious when they are in a report issued by a government agency. 

To Matt McGuire, who teaches educational technology at the University of New Brunswick, the two references bear the hallmarks of so-called “hallucinations,” when an artificial intelligence system comes up with responses that sound plausible but that are factually wrong or fabricated. 

He said there is even a popular term for when AI jumbles different pieces of real information to create something entirely new: “Frankencitations.”

“It makes us question the integrity of a document and the process that was followed,” McGuire said. 

“So, an article can lose its professional and academic integrity if it’s known to contain these hallucinated references. Even if the core arguments or the data in the paper still holds value, fabricating sources violate the foundational rules of research.”

New Brunswick Education Minister Claire Johnson and Premier Susan Holt spoke to reporters in June after releasing education plans for the francophone and anglophone sectors. (Shane Magee/CBC)

Nabil Beitinjaneh, faculty lecturer and data programs co-ordinator at McGill University in Montreal, said the use of AI is not the problem. He said he would expect government employees — and anyone writing a report — to consult the tools at their disposal. 

“The real question is not that they’re using generative AI,” he said. “It’s more, what is the process that they’re using? What’s the accountability and governance that is happening within the process of delivering a document of this importance?”

Beitinjaneh believes a better use of AI would have helped the plan’s writers keep better track of their sources and correct other more minor mistakes. In his review of the plan, Beitinjaneh found some of the referenced authors’ names were misspelled. 

He said there were also a few orphaned citations, meaning works quoted in the body of the text don’t appear on the reference list, so people can’t look up the references on their own.

In a statement to CBC News, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development said that staff within the department wrote the education plan, and that all references and studies used to inform the report are real and valid.

A spokesperson acknowledges an AI-powered assistant was used — Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot — to format the bibliography for the anglophone plan, which is how two incorrect references made it into the document.

“The human review of the document missed those incorrect references and corrections are being made,” wrote Shawn Berry, communications director for the Education Department.

Geiger, meanwhile, said the impact of misattributing academic work can reach well beyond the New Brunswick border, especially for early-career researchers who develop that work.

“To someone like me who’s established, it probably doesn’t matter that much. But a junior person who likes to be cited in policy documents, it’s really important because that reference won’t come up on any of the software we use to detect impact on policy.”