Last month EY — one of the four giant accounting firms — quietly pulled a report on supermarket loyalty schemes because the footnotes pointed at studies that did not exist. This month KPMG, another of the four, withdrew its agentic-AI paper after GPTZero, a detector that scores text for machine authorship, flagged the prose as synthetic.
A GPU running an 8-billion-parameter model at inference draws roughly 700 watt-hours per thousand pages of slop; across a Big Four rotation that's 2.8 kilowatt-hours of cooling water boiled off to fabricate citations a graduate could have written sober. I did the arithmetic.
Deloitte's apology is presumably drafted, awaiting only the date. PwC takes December.
Meanwhile Geoffrey at EY still prints every deck single-sided.
Based on the original article "KPMG pulls report on AI usage due to apparent hallucinations".
