"To conduct their study, the researchers prompted GPT-4o, a recent model from OpenAI, to generate six different literature reviews. These reviews centered on three mental health conditions chosen for their varying levels of public recognition and research coverage: major depressive disorder (a widely known and heavily researched condition), binge eating disorder (moderately known), and body dysmorphic disorder (a less-known condition with a smaller body of research). This selection allowed for a direct comparison of the AI’s performance on topics with different amounts of available information in its training data.
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After generating the reviews, the researchers methodically extracted all 176 citations provided by the AI. Each reference was painstakingly verified using multiple academic databases, including Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed. Citations were sorted into one of three categories: fabricated (the source did not exist), real with errors (the source existed but had incorrect details like the wrong year, volume number, or author list), or fully accurate. The team then analyzed the rates of fabrication and accuracy across the different disorders and review types.
The analysis showed that across all six reviews, nearly one-fifth of the citations, 35 out of 176, were entirely fabricated. Of the 141 citations that corresponded to real publications, almost half contained at least one error
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The rate of citation fabrication was strongly linked to the topic. For major depressive disorder, the most well-researched condition, only 6 percent of citations were fabricated. In contrast, the fabrication rate rose sharply to 28 percent for binge eating disorder and 29 percent for body dysmorphic disorder. This suggests the AI is less reliable when generating references for subjects that are less prominent in its training data."
https://www.psypost.org/study-finds-nearly-two-thirds-of-ai-generated-citations-are-fabricated-or-contain-errors/
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