The report behind a national ban cites papers nobody can find

Australia commissioned a report to back the age-assurance technology behind its ban on social media for under-sixteens — 3.48 million dollars of public money, underpinning the trial that makes the ban workable. A Guardian analysis found a section of it citing academic articles the paper could not locate. A Senate hearing was told about it today. The ban is already law.

The authors say they used ChatGPT for editing, and they deny that the citation errors were hallucinations. That is the whole fight in one sentence. Editing is a defensible use of the tool. Producing a reference to a paper that was never written is not — and once a document is finished, those two look identical from the outside.

The detail worth keeping: Two limits are worth carrying. The Guardian reported that it could not find the articles; it has not shown where the citations came from, and a citation can fail for boring reasons — a wrong identifier, a journal that moved, a title recorded badly. So the cause is genuinely unsettled. What is settled is narrower and more useful: a footnote is the only handle anyone outside the drafting process gets on whether a claim can be checked, and the question now in front of the Senate is whether the evidence base for a law already in force can be independently re-verified at all. If you produce or commission research that anyone will act on, the practical version of this is unglamorous — resolve every citation yourself before the document leaves the building.