Blue Chip Consultant Could Shade Red from Embarrassment
May 19, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
As a former laborer in the vineyard of a big time consulting firm, I would not want to be within 100 miles of an office suspected of plagiarism, recycling another firm’s data, or just cutting corners. I reported directly to the president of the firm’s largest unit, and he and his trusty officer “people manager” had no problems making people find their future elsewhere.
Why am I thinking about the pressures of this thrilling and stroke-inducing work experience? I just read “AI Hallucinations Appear to Be Creeping into Consulting Reports.” The write up points out that consulting firms work their “best of the best” like dogs and want public-facing documents that sell, sell, sell. Being (or at least appearing to be) smart is the point of a blue chip consulting firm, or that used to be the pretense. I want to be clear. Sherwood wrote about an AI detection discovery by a company called GPTZero. No, I did not bother to check out GPTZero. Therefore, like a good dinobaby, I shall operate on the assumption that the data in the report are “alleged” and “close enough for horseshoes.” I find the alleged research amusing and warranting one killer question revealed at the end of this essay.
Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough.
Here’s the killer statement in the Sherwood write up:
In all, GPTZero’s investigation alleges that 60 percent of the references in EY’s report are hallucinated.
Now Sherwood’s data comes from an research outfit unfamiliar to me. With this caveat, I quote the Sherwood article as offering something interesting:
The document [the Ernst & Young white paper or thought piece] is a standard advisory report describing the state of cybersecurity weaknesses in the travel industry’s loyalty points ecosystem. But it appears to have issues with citing nonexistent sources. On page 4, it describes the global loyalty program economy as a $200 billion business, with between 30% and 50% of loyalty points being unused — something that makes them “a prime target for exploitation” by cyber criminals. One of the sources of this claim is a Forbes article cited in the report’s Resources section titled, “The $200 Billion Loyalty Economy.” The report’s link to that story, purportedly published in October 2023 by writer Blake Morgan, a customer experience futurist, returns an error that says, “We can’t find the page that you are looking for.” It’s not clear that Morgan published a story with that headline in October 2023, and the URL has not been indexed on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Is this a smoking gun or a dead dog with multiple knife wounds?
I don’t know. The Sherwood article includes this statement, “EY didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.”
How would you like to be the partner fielding this inquiry. My hunch is that few in EY know who wrote the report or why. Most will not have read the report because these best of the best are busy doing dot points, arm wrestling Excel (hopefully without a Copilot tag team partner), and making presentations to land a project or get a signature on a scope change document. Talk to a company about a report allegedly from their employer that contains made up information. If that inquiry ended up on my desk, I would say, “No way, José.”
The write up points to other Ernst & Young missteps:
Included in the report’s references are citations to a broad range of articles and reports that appear not to exist. One link to a WIRED story, titled “AI Voice Deepfakes Targeting Call Centers,” also returns a 404 error. A second, to a story purportedly titled “AI Security Gaps,” also leads nowhere. A link to a CyberNews report does the same. And the claim that 30% to 50% of loyalty points are never redeemed is attributed to McKinsey & Co. — though the references section cites a “Loyalty Economics Report” that GPTZero says doesn’t exist. Instead, GPTZero suspects the report has incorrectly hoovered up a fictional reference on a second website, FinancialIT.net, in a separate story. “This is what we would call secondhand hallucinations,” said Tian. McKinsey didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Let’s assume that the GPTZero’s data as presented by Sherwood are a true presentation of what the intrepid researcher team found. I want to offer some observations:
- I am not surprised that smart software is used by the best of the best at blue chip consulting firms. Some of these outfits have been running training programs to get their staff to use these “next big thing” tools. Of course, the best of the best will give AI a whirl. The pressure to be smarter every day than a lot of other people who want to be smarter every day is not part of most firms’ approach to work.
- What struck me is that the best of the best appear to accept outputs from AI systems as accurate. But there are many reasons for online content to disappear. My own Telegram Notes’ articles have been scrubbed from LinkedIn and from a small time outfit in South Africa of all places. An AI detector is just wrong just like AI outputs. Someone is offended an deletes a post or in some cases an entire online presence. (Hey, where did those French tax forms go?) A third party service falls over and never gets up again. (Sound familiar BlueHost?) If you want to see disappearing content, conduct some research into the Telegram system. VKontakte posts disappear. Telegram posts vaporize. Entire Web sites in Russia go dark. Blink and the information highway is like shifting sand in Oman.
- I am surprised that only a few examples of a blue chip consulting firm recycling AI slop have surfaced. Come on, researchers. I get flooded with McKinsey blandishments to my benkent2020 email address. Why not parse outputs from that firm, Bain, BCG, or Booz, Allen? Do some digging. My hunch is that there are some other examples floating around and still publicly accessible.
- Mobile and PC native people believe that a computer only outputs the truth. That is a bit of a problem. Why would someone check something that is by definition accurate?
Net net: Better analysis of these “thought leader” documents will make clear that paying big or huge money for something one can get for a few bucks a month is not a good idea. There is a caveat. The client may not care where a blue chip gets information. The purpose of the project is to derail a competitor, get promoted by discrediting another person, or some other equally non-thought-leader type of outcome. Nevertheless, it is either embarrassment or a lawsuit.
AI is great, is it not? So here is the one question: “Why are analysts not writing about other egregious misrepresentations of authoritative information?”
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2026
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