Re: Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

From	Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net>
Newsgroups	sci.edu, comp.ai.philosophy, alt.books, alt.politics.media, rec.arts.books, misc.writing
Subject	Re: Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?
Date	2026-05-18 10:46 -0400
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<87fr3ozsgc.fsf@posteo.de> (permalink)
References	<20260512.024503.fea93242@mixmin.net> <eb950l1ibvjm1povpc1s3q808nlro4bitq@4ax.com>

Cross-posted to 6 groups.

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Steve Hayes <hayesstw@telkomsa.net> writes:

<snip>
> On Tue, 12 May 2026 02:45:03 +0100, Lawfare Review
> <noreply@mixmin.net> wrote:
> LLM bots can be useful tools but they are not AI, and are not
> reliable.

I have never seen an actual definition if what AI *is*.  Infind it to be
a rather useless term fornthat reason.

> They are not intelligent or sentient (though the programmers
> of some of them try to make them appear so). They do not "understand"
> what they are fed, or what they spit out. Their use in education
> should be limited to what they are good at, and one needs education
> apart form LLM bots to be able to discern what they are good at and
> what they are not good at. If students use them to write essays, they
> will not learn that discernment.

I don't knownthat there's an argument to be made that they're
particularly good at *anything*.

> My friend who submitted the journal article to Claude is a nuclear
> physicist, but the article he got it to write was in my field, not
> his, and he rather naively trusted what Claude spat out. If it had
> been in his field, his bullshit detectors would have been better
> equipped to deal with it. 
>
> In the age of so-called AI, educators need to give serious thought to
> better ways of honing students' bullshit detectors. 

I usually tell people the following about LLMs:

Ask it questions about a subject you know well.  See how long it takes
it to tell you sonething inaccurate.  Ask yourself if you'd have caught
the mistake if you didn't have the knowledge you do.  Finally, ask
yourself: do you still trust the LLM?

-- 
Regards,
Jonathan Lamothe
https://jlamothe.net - PGP: 9CF2CE03EBF08E8C8B66C3660198463E3CF3FFD1
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