If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist.
AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is. There needs to be serious social consequences to this kind of thing, otherwise we are tacitly endorsing it.
Really? Regardless of whether it's a good paper?
Old Chinese mathematics texts are difficult to date because they often purport to be older than they are. But the contents are unaffected by this. There is a history-of-math problem, but there's no math problem.
Whether the students directly used LLMs or just read content online that was produced with them and cited after just shows how difficult these things made gathering information that's verifiable.
That's... gibberish.
Anything you can do to verify a paper, you can do to verify the same paper with all citations scrubbed.
Whether the citations support the paper, or whether they exist at all, just doesn't have anything to do with what the paper says.
But the author(s) of the paper is almost by definition a bad scientist (or whatever field they are in). When a researcher writes a paper for publication, if they're not expected to write the thing themselves, at least they should be responsible for checking the accuracy of the contents, and citations are part of the paper...
There is so much BS being submitted to conferences and decreasing the amount of BS they see would result in less skimpy reviews and also less apathy