My AI writing tool started making up sources out of nowhere last Thursday

I was using a popular AI assistant to help draft a report for a local community board meeting. It gave me three citations that sounded totally legit, complete with author names and publication dates. When I went to verify them for the final version, I found out two of the sources don't exist at all and the third was from a completely different topic. Has anyone else run into this kind of hallucination issue with AI tools used for research?

2 comments

2 Comments

dakota_nelson433d ago

Used to think people were overreacting about this stuff. @rose_hart had a point about fact checking being on us. Then I spent three hours tracking down a citation for a grant proposal last month. Turned out the whole journal article was fake. Author name was real, journal was real, but the article never existed. Changed my mind real fast. These tools need serious guardrails or at least a warning label.

rose_hart3d ago

Oh come on, is it really that big of a deal? I mean, AI tools are basically autocomplete on steroids, they're not gonna be perfect. It's like getting mad at a calculator for showing the wrong answer when you type the numbers in wrong. You should always fact check stuff from these tools, especially for something official like a community board report. Maybe it's just me but I feel like everyone knows by now that AI makes stuff up sometimes. Like using it for citations without double checking is kinda asking for trouble.