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.
The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. They are also assuming good faith.
I experimented a couple of years ago with getting LLMs to check citations but stopped working on it because there's no incentive. You could run a fancy expensive pipeline burning scarce GPU hours and find a bunch of bad citations. Then what? Nobody cares. No journal is going to retract any of these papers, the academics themselves won't care or even respond to your emails, nobody is willing to pay for this stuff, least of all the universities, journals or governments themselves.
For example, there's a guy in France who runs a pre-LLM pipeline to discover bad papers using hand-coded heuristics like regexs or metadata analysis e.g. checking if a citation has been retracted. Many of the things it detects are plagiarism, paper mills (i.e. companies that sell fake papers to academics for a profit), or the result of joke paper creators like SciGen.
https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1::::::
Other than populating an obscure database nobody knows about, this work achieved bupkis.