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Comment by andrepd

15 hours ago

If you are citing a work you paste a citation to that work. If you are bullshitting you ask an AI to come up with a citation. Jesus, there is zero reason to ever "generate a citation" if you are not, in fact, commiting fraud.

That's like saying that there's zero reason to ever ask an LLM to do basic math for you. Sure you probably shouldn't do that but sometimes it's convenient and so people will inevitably do exactly that regardless of the somewhat frequent wrong answers that are guaranteed to ensue.

I much agree. But I wonder shouldn't the citations all be hyperlinks and thus easy to verify?

  • How specific are the citations? If it's “Sentence 4 on page 97 supports” or “Paper says ‘___’” then I imagine it would be fairly easy. If it's “(__ page long) paper supports x”, then very difficult?