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Fabricated citations from LLMs (Walters & Wilder 2023)

Reference

Citation: Walters, W. H. and Wilder, E. I. "Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT" (2023). Type: paper. Link: PMC11031695.

What it is

A study measuring the accuracy of citations produced by a large language model. It finds that a large share of the generated references are fabricated or contain substantive errors.

Role in the record

  • Grounds BP01: fabricated citations are a failure mode of using a frontier LLM where a specialized retrieval method fits.
  • Grounds BP07: evidence that a large fraction of LLM-generated citations are fabricated or erroneous (support for requiring a source trail).

Atom-level for/against detail and quotes are in the provenance data (assets/provenance.yml), keyed by practice atom.

Discussion