41 points TangerineDream 1 hour ago 6 comments

kome 45 minutes ago | parent

it happens all the time - it's bad, but i wonder if it is newsworthy anymore. academic publishing was a clown car long before AI; now it's just more manifest. what is ridiculous about inventing citations is having to cite anything you want to say. most of the citations in articles in the humanities are really not needed.

bombcar 37 minutes ago | parent

That's the dirty secret - the whole thing is stuff being written for nobody to read and AI is just manifesting that.

nkrisc 9 minutes ago | parent

It appears that even the “authors” don’t read it.

nickphx 18 minutes ago | parent

except it is all a clown car.

toccter 35 minutes ago | parent

The interesting failure here is not that a model can invent a plausible citation, but that the surrounding workflow let it pass as verified. A citation is a verifiable claim about another document, so it should be checked by retrieval and matching against the source, not by asking the same generation process whether it sounds right. In my experience, the fix is boring and effective: keep generated text clearly marked as a draft, require a separate check for title, date, and quoted content, and block submission when any check is missing. Without that separation, confident-sounding references will keep slipping through precisely because they look finished.

gertrunde 12 minutes ago | parent

The mischievous part of me wonders what would happen if torrentfreak wrote a matching article, with content that messes with the paper...