Making the most of Generative AI (ChatGPT etc.)

Citation and Attribution

Use with caution: Hallucinations may occur

Generative AI has a tendency to hallucinate, particularly academic citations. That means that when asked to generate text with citations, tools like ChatGPT can often make up sources that don't actually exist. To complicate matters, it doesn't do this consistently, so it may return a text with both real and fabricated sources as in the example below.

In the next below, ChatGPT was provided with the following prompt:

Please provide two to three paragraphs with in-text citations about architecture in extreme or adverse environments.

The only reference returned that appears to be real is the first, though the author seems to be incorrect. The others are not real.