> Modern tools have made the citation process more comfortable,

That also makes some of those errors easier. A bad auto-import of paper metadata can silently screw up some of the publication details, and replacing an early preprint with the peer-reviewed article of record takes annoying manual intervention.

There are other issues. In January they claimed that a US health report contained "fabricated" and "AI generated" citations with the headline being a claim from a Cigna Group report. Their claim it's fabricated is based on nothing more than the URL now being a redirect of the type common in corporate website reorgs.

I did some checking and found the report does exist, but the citation is still not quite correct. Then I discovered someone is running some LLM based citation checker already, which already fact checked this claim and did a correct writeup that seems a lot better than what this GPTZero tool does.

https://checkplease.neocities.org/maha/html/17-loneliness-73...

The mistakes in the citation are the sort of mistake that could have been made by both a human or an AI, really. The visualization in the report is confusing and does contain the 73% number (rounded up), but it's unclear how to interpret the numbers because it's some sort of "vitality index" and not what you'd expect based on how it's introduced. At first glance I actually mis-interpreted it the same way the report does, so it's hard to view this is as clear evidence of AI misuse. Yet the GPTZero folks do make very strong claims based on nothing more than a URL scraper script.

I mean, if you’re able to take the citation, find the cited work, and definitively state ‘looks like they got the title wrong’ or ‘they attributed the paper to the wrong authors’, that doesn’t sound like what people usually mean when they say a ‘hallucinated’ citation. Work that is lazily or poorly cited but nonetheless attempts to cite real work is not the problem. Work which gives itself false authority by claiming to cite works that simply do not exist is the main concern surely?

Further, if I use AI-written citations to back some claim or fact, what are the actual claims or facts based on? These started happening in law because someone writes the text and then wishes there was a source that was relevant and actually supportive of their claim. But if someone puts in the labor to check your real/extant sources, there's nothing backing it (e.g. MAHA report).

>Fabricated citations are not errors.

Interesting that you hallucinated the word "fabricated" here where I broadly talked about errors. Humans, right? Can't trust them.

Firstly, just about every paper ever written in the history of papers has errors in it. Some small, some big. Most accidental, but some intentional. Sometimes people are sloppy keeping notes, transcribe a row, get a name wrong, do an offset by 1. Sometimes they just entirely make up data or findings. This is not remotely new. It has happened as long as we've had papers. Find an old, pre-LLM paper and go through the citations -- especially for a tosser target like this where there are tens of thousands of low effort papers submitted -- and you're going to find a lot of sloppy citations that are hard to rationalize.

Secondly, the "hallucination" is that this particular snake-oil firm couldn't find given papers in many cases (they aren't foolish enough to think that means they were fabricated. But again, they're looking to sell a tool to rubes, so the conclusion is good enough), and in others that some of the author names are wrong. Eh.

The issue here is that many of the ‘hallucinations’ this article cites aren’t ’papers which do not exist’. They are incorrect author attributions, publication dates, or titles.

>It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans.

But no one is claiming these papers were hallucinated whole, so I don't see how that's relevant. This study -- notably to sell an "AI detector", which is largely a laughable snake-oil field -- looked purely at the accuracy of citations[1] among a very large set of citations. Errors in papers are not remotely uncommon, and finding some errors is...exactly what one would expect. As the GP said, do the same study on pre-LLM papers and you'll find an enormous number of incorrect if not fabricated citations. Peer review has always been an illusion of auditing.

1 - Which is such a weird thing to sell an "AI detection" tool. Clearly it was mostly manual given that they somehow only managed to check a tiny subset of the papers, so in all likelihood was some guy going through citations and checking them on Google Search.

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