Relatedly:
As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. [...] That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals. [...] That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations.
