Editors’ Summary: This paper analyzes AI-generated citations through a focus on the recurring non-existent citation “Education Governance and Datafication” attributed to Ben Williamson and Nelli Piattoeva and identified in Williamson’s post Tracing the half life of a zombie citation. The author demonstrates that these hallucinated citations are not random inventions, but rather a combination of real authors, journals, dates, and keywords. He argues that they are not random errors and are instead predictable, pattern-driven artifacts of how genAI models generate text. The ability of newer AI models to search the web helps to mitigate these hallucinated citations, but is not able to eradicate them.
Editors’ Choice: How unique are hallucinated citations offered by generative Artificial Intelligence models?
