They couyld have indeed presented data that only AIs would scrape or notice... which would be entirely legitimate on their part to do.
My own website spews bogus content and misinformation about almost any topic to misconfigured scrapers. I expect to eventually see it in some training sets.
it happens all the time - it's bad, but i wonder if it is newsworthy anymore. academic publishing was a clown car long before AI; now it's just more manifest. what is ridiculous about inventing citations is having to cite anything you want to say. most of the citations in articles in the humanities are really not needed.
The interesting failure here is not that a model can invent a plausible citation, but that the surrounding workflow let it pass as verified. A citation is a verifiable claim about another document, so it should be checked by retrieval and matching against the source, not by asking the same generation process whether it sounds right. In my experience, the fix is boring and effective: keep generated text clearly marked as a draft, require a separate check for title, date, and quoted content, and block submission when any check is missing. Without that separation, confident-sounding references will keep slipping through precisely because they look finished.
My own website spews bogus content and misinformation about almost any topic to misconfigured scrapers. I expect to eventually see it in some training sets.
Are they force feeding these information to AI?