Comment by bjourne
20 hours ago
Sorry, but blaming it on "AI autocomplete" is the dumbest excuse ever. Author lists come from BibTeX entries and while they often contains errors since they can come from many sources, they do not contain completely made up authors. I don't share your view that hallucinated citations are less damaging in background section. Background, related works, and introduction is the sections where citations most often show up. These sections are meant to be read and generating them with AI is plain cheating.
I'm not blaming anything on anything, because I did not (nor did the authors) confirm the cause of any of these errors.
> I don't share your view that hallucinated citations are less damaging in background section.
Who exactly is damaged in this particular instance?
Trust is damaged. I cannot verify that the evidence is correct only that the conclusions follow from the evidence. I have to rely on the authors to truthfully present their evidence. If they for whatever reason add hallucinated citations to their background that trust is 100% gone.
You are speaking in the abstract. Did you read this paper? I suspect you did not.