Citation
1 min read · Reviewed 17 Oct 2026
In short
A reference to a source — which AI can invent wholesale.
In plain English
A pointer to where a claim came from. Models are unusually good at producing citations that look correct — plausible author, real-sounding journal, sensible year — for papers that were never written.
A real example
Ask for reading on a niche topic and you may get a perfectly formatted bibliography of which half is fiction. Nothing in the formatting distinguishes the real entries from the invented ones.
Why it matters
Treat any citation from an AI as a search term, not a source. It often points at roughly the right literature; you still have to go and find the actual thing.
