Prosecutors seek the contracts behind Poland brand report written with AI

Prosecutors in Warsaw have asked Poland’s Ministry of Sport and Tourism for a copy of the Poland brand report and for every contract behind it. The document, titled “Polaków portret własny” (“Poles’ self-portrait”), was meant to describe what the country stands for. Critics say much of the text came out of a language model, that is a program that writes sentences on its own.

Warsaw prosecutors are looking at fraud and official duty

Prosecutor Maciej Młynarczyk confirmed the case to Polish media. His office is following two threads: possible fraud, and possible failure of duty by ministry officials. Nobody has been charged so far. The sum under review is 179,738.19 zloty, paid by the ministry for a tourism project inside the Poland brand work. One of the critics, Sebastian Meitz, spoke publicly about 200,000 zloty. The ministry has not confirmed the higher figure.

The report placed Katowice in central Poland

The errors are what made the document famous. It put Katowice, a city in the south, in central Poland. It said young Poles speak fluent Mandarin. Critics also listed a line crediting the country with five Nobel laureates. These are the kinds of mistakes a model makes when no person checks the output. That gap is also why brands started selling their human work as a selling point.

Mróz-Gorgoń says AI only transcribed and edited

Barbara Mróz-Gorgoń, the government plenipotentiary for the Poland brand, resigned on 21 August 2026, about three weeks after she took the post. She wrote that the scale of the abuse made the job impossible. She rejects the main charge. She says AI was used “exclusively for transcription, summary and text editing” (quoted by Wirtualne Media, in Polish), not to design the research or write the conclusions. She says the work included two-hour group interviews in five cities and eight-hour workshops with groups of about 20 people. The ministry says no contract covered the report as it was published. An association picked in a competition did the work.

Poland has no brand plenipotentiary while the case runs

For marketers the useful part here is the paperwork, not the politics. When you buy research, it helps to write into the contract which AI tools a supplier may use, and who checks the facts before delivery. Using the tools is not the problem on its own. A Warsaw property brand said so openly when it built the whole Towarowa22 campaign with generative AI. The trouble starts when nobody checks whether the sentences are true, and when the label is missing. Polish agencies spent the summer working out who has to label AI content under the new EU rules. This case shows the same question reaching public money.