Keira (She/Her)May 27

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/116647849282379563

The thing I don't get here, is how?

I understand that AI hallucinates papers, it's very annoying and one of the reasons I don't use it for research.

But you're supposed to go read the paper before you cite it. Evaluate the paper, even. And you can't even skim or uncritically read just the abstract of a paper that doesn't exist.

So a huge number of published academics don't even read what they cite?

It's concerning that there's a higher standard asked of students than professionals.

#academic #academia #AI

Show threadCarolannie
@keira_reckons Academics writing papers look at the cites used in papers by academics they like, or know, or they think has a good reputation. That's often good enough when you're under pressure to publish. Sadly. Been there....
May 27 at 9:37pmWeb
Show threadKeira (She/Her)May 27

@carolannie That makes sense, and seems to be what happened in my nutrition example - all the serious people were citing the same source, so it must be true. Everyone cuts corners at work sometimes.

But the article says it's younger/newer academics, and at least the first one in any citation chain must have known they hadn't read the paper, and didn't see it cited - they had to have gotten it directly from an LLM and never tried to find it.

Show threadBennetMay 27
@keira_reckons @carolannie Yeah, even if I'm citing a paper on the basis of previous citations, I'll still go look up the original to enter it into my citation manager properly. Even that's enough to weed out fakes (I haven't found one yet), and it also gives me a chance to do a quick skim and check that it's at least relevant (and it's not uncommon for me to find that it's pretty marginal and go look up a better source).