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Polish Ministry Paid 200,000 Zloty for AI-Riddled Report
A 200,000-zloty government report meant to underpin Poland's new nation-branding strategy turned out to be riddled with empty footnotes, invented data, and telltale signs of raw ChatGPT output. The government's brand plenipotentiary admits AI was used for transcription and editing, but denies it generated the content.
Poland's Ministry of Sport and Tourism paid 200,000 zloty for a report meant to become the foundation of a new strategy for promoting Poland abroad. The document, titled "Polaków Portret Własny" ("Poles' Self-Portrait"), surfaced online in August 2026 and quickly became an object of ridicule after internet users found empty footnotes, contradictory figures, and passages that read like unedited ChatGPT output.
What the report contains
The document was meant to describe how Poles see themselves and their country, based on focus-group research and workshops held in several cities. The trouble is that the report itself cannot consistently say how many cities were covered - different parts of the text mention seven, five, and three cities. The authors also write about five Polish Nobel laureates, even though Poland has produced seven.
The most widely mocked passages are ones where Polish text is mixed with English interjections in capital letters, the kind typically found in unedited language-model outputs. The document includes phrases such as "SYNDROM IMPOSTORA na POZIOMIE NARODOWYM - Despite RZECZYWISTYCH OSIĄGNIĘĆ" (roughly, "IMPOSTOR SYNDROME at the NATIONAL LEVEL - Despite REAL ACHIEVEMENTS") and a heading reading "AXIOMA 1 - AUTENTYCZNOŚĆ PONAD PERFEKCJĄ" ("AXIOM 1 - AUTHENTICITY OVER PERFECTION"). Critics also flagged an unverified claim that 95 percent of young Poles speak fluent English, along with phrases about supposedly "deep roots in a history of suffering" that cite no source anywhere in the text.
Government response
The report's author, and the government's plenipotentiary for promoting the Poland brand, is Barbara Mróz-Gorgoń, a professor at the Wrocław University of Economics who was appointed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the rank of secretary of state just weeks before the scandal broke. In an interview with wnp.pl, she pushed back on claims that the document's content was generated by artificial intelligence.
We used AI tools solely for transcription, summarization, and text editing - Barbara Mróz-Gorgoń, government plenipotentiary for promoting the Poland brand
Mróz-Gorgoń stresses that the field research involved hundreds of participants from the tourism, culture, and science sectors across five Polish cities, and that the substantive conclusions were reached without AI involvement. She also announced that starting in January 2027, Poland's promotion abroad will follow a single coherent strategy built on three pillars: Polish talent, Polish reliability, and Polish quality. The government is due to present the full strategy by December 2026, coordinating the work of six ministries, cultural institutions, investment agencies, and non-governmental organizations.
Tip of the iceberg
As wnp.pl notes, the uproar over a single report may be only the visible part of a bigger problem. Poland's economic diplomacy has struggled for years, and business promotion for the country is scattered across numerous institutions with no single decision-making center. Critics ask why new structures like a "KPI dashboard" or a "content repository" are needed at all when, as they put it sarcastically, "we already have ChatGPT."
Plans revealed alongside the scandal, belonging to the Marka Polska Think Tank foundation ("Poland Brand Think Tank"), raise further concerns. Among the ideas for spending 520-670 million zloty between 2026 and 2028 were a Polish NFT collection, recurring events in the metaverse, and an AI system called "Polska Persona," priced at 65-90 million zloty. On top of that came a foundation office costing 70 million zloty.
A 70-million-zloty office? Will only 30k-a-month experts be working there? - Wojtek Kardyś, commenting on the plans of the Marka Polska Think Tank foundation
Why it matters
The case shows how easily public institutions in Poland can fall into the trap of apparent efficiency offered by AI tools when there are no procedures to verify the quality of the finished document. The ministry paid full price for work that, evidently, nobody read before publication - otherwise the contradictory city counts or a World Bank ranking discontinued six years ago should have been caught when the deliverable was accepted.
For Poland's public sector, this is a warning ahead of future tenders for strategic documents where AI is meant to assist, not replace, analytical work. Ministries and government agencies are increasingly turning to generative AI when producing content, but the "Poland brand" scandal shows that without clear quality-control rules, the cost of such errors ultimately falls on the taxpayer.
Critics of the report stress that the underlying idea, promoting Poland through one coherent narrative, is sound, and that the problem isn't the use of AI itself but the lack of oversight over the final output. The coming months will show whether the full "Poland brand" strategy, promised for December 2026, can restore the credibility lost after the publication of the ill-fated report.
