It's not just AI, though. I did a doctorate in physics about 40 years back, and bad references were a problem back then.

Doesn't matter if it is AI hallucinations or entirely human scientific fraud, the problem is the same, and the solution works fine for both cases.

If you can't validate that your bibliography is full of real articles, you shouldn't get published.

LLMs have just poured gasoline on the fire.

In what way? Surely something like the source not quite saying what was cited, or mixing up citations, rather than inventing them outright?

That, and mixing reference details from multiple sources and messing it up.

Let's say you read a paper on Arxiv but cite the version that was submitted to a journal or conference, without realizing that the authors made changes to the version they submitted and forgot to upload them to Arxiv.

This deserves a lifetime ban for being a bad researcher obviously. (/s)

In physics, references which just didn't exist. That could be that the author made it up, but often it's because they transcribed the reference from another paper without reading it - we know because a few people have deliberately introduced fake references to trace how far they would go. The reasons are not the same as for AI, but the problem they produce is the same.

References which don't accurately reflect the quoted material seem more common in other subjects.

"Bad", like, you literally just made them up? I hope that would have been a problem.

Well, I certainly didn't make them up. But it was common to follow a reference and find that there was no paper on the other end.

Yes and ffs arrows kill people too but we don't bring that up every time we talk about what to do with guns.

Which is why the angry replies on Twitter from AI hype accounts is so funny. You should get penalised for fake references and profanity in your submissions, even if you wrote your slop longhand. I don't know why anyone would have an issue with this policy.

Imagine how bad they are now then.