Jul. 13—SRI CV Plastics' application for tax breaks is on hold after the company was accused of circulating a summary of a study that was fabricated and produced by artificial intelligence.
Lourdes Vera, whose family is from Lockport and who now lives in Buffalo, stood up after a public hearing in Town of Lockport Industrial Development Agency Thursday morning and denounced the company for sharing the AI-generated summary of a paper that was supposed to be in a legitimate journal from 2004.
"I received this document, the summary of an article that's called 'Life Cycle Assessment of Commodity Plastic Pipes,' " she said. "I tried to find it in the volume and the issue of the journal —a well reputed journal — Environmental Science & Technology, and I couldn't find it. And I'm a researcher. I looked up the journal. It was not there."
Vera also ran the summary through a Generative Pre-training Transformers detector, which checks documents to see if they were made by GPTs, a form of AI. While the capability of GPTs is growing, it does not consistently create accurate documentation. The text was immediately flagged.
"Seventy-two percent, at least, was written by AI," she said.
Operations Manager for SRI CV Plastics Varum Velumani were on hand Thursday to present to the IDA board the company's plan. After the hearing closed, he and Terry Burton, an attorney, spoke of the alleged false document.
"We're trying to get to the bottom of it," Burton said. "(Velumani) is not the author of it. He found something on the Internet and we thought it was legitimate and shared it. ... We didn't create it. We used it, apparently, and I'm not sure who it was shared with, because today it came as a surprise ... But if it's not legitimate, we'll apologize, but we're just trying to get to the bottom of it."
The board took no action on the company's subsidy request Thursday, citing the volume of information and public input board members had received about the project.
Another University at Buffalo professor who attended Thursday's hearing, Tom Covey, said the use of artificial intelligence to generate a fake summary of an academic article should disqualify the company from IDA subsidies.
"That's a non-starter," Covey, a Lockport native, said.
In addition to speaking at the public hearing, Vera also submitted a written comment where she shared her concern regarding PVC production in the Town of Lockport.
"Not only do polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and other plastic processing plants emit carcinogenic and other toxic compounds, but this is a poor economic investment with governing bodies such as Taiwan and the European Union are systematically phasing out PVC and other plastic manufacturing," she said.