The mischievous part of me wonders what would happen if torrentfreak wrote a matching article, with content that messes with the paper...

Why the f*ck would authors fail to check everything unless they were just being lazy. Its one thing to get assistance. It is totally another to give up all responsibility when you use AI. I wouldn't trust anything they did with or without AI.

Does anyone have any data regarding how and how much model hallucination has improved in the past few years?

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.

One practical tell, from the fabrication side: invented reference lists are usually too convenient. Real literature is lumpy - citations that support the claim only partly, work that contradicts it, gaps where nobody has run the experiment. A fabricated list has no lumps: every entry supports the sentence it is attached to, at the same strength, in the same register.

The other thing is that confidence in the text carries no information. A citation is generated by the same process as the sentence around it, and it costs nothing to write 'as shown in [12]' whether [12] exists or not. Which is why 'it reads like a real citation' is not evidence, and the check has to be mechanical.

I run a small AI-assisted publication, solo. Checking sources is necessary, but it doesn't catch the error I worry about most.

Citation checks find invented sources. They don't find a real source cited for something it doesn't say.

I hit one in my own work today. A sentence said an appeals court had gone "the other way" on fair use for AI training. Case, date, holding — all correct. Every checkable fact passed. But I'd only read summaries. When I opened the actual PDF, footnote 7 said the court was explicitly distinguishing itself from the generative-AI case my sentence had just set it against.

No citation checker catches that. The source was real, the quote was right. The framing was wrong.

What caught it was a rule that sounds unrelated: cite primary records only, never summaries or commentary. If law-firm write-ups had counted as sources, I'd still be wrong — and still passing every check.