AI Academic Misconduct

you ask AI for sources on climate change and crop yields it gives you 10 perfectly looking citation you use them and after your supervisor checks half of them don't exist here is why AI generated references can end your academic career and what you should do instead let me be direct about this never ask AI to give you references I'm not saying be careful with it I'm saying never here is why this is a non negotiable imagine that you type give me 10 references on climate change effects on wheat yield then AI gives you a list of 10 references with names with years with DOIs and of course they look completely legitimate properly formatted very nice journal names and realistic titles AI does not know whether a paper exist or not and I know sometimes it can give you relevant papers but AI will generate text that look like what a proper citation should look like based on the patterns that it has learnt this happens because AI models predict what text should come next after others based on patterns when you ask for references on a topic AI has been trained with thousands of real citations it has seen real citations it knows the format it knows the topics that are commonly studied and it knows the author names that are common so it generates something that fits that pattern but the specific combination of author year title DOI journal name may have never been published before it's like giving you a perfectly formatted citation for a paper that does not exist this thing can destroy your integrity as an academic because you have cited a fabricated source when this is discovered your examiner tries to find the paper once they cannot find it even if your intent was not to deceive or you genuinely did not know that AI hallucinated the outcome still remains the same you have presented fabricated source as a real research that is academic misconduct sometimes the citation exists but it says something else you are attributing false claims to real researchers real scientists this is serious it's classed as misinformation let me tell you what to do instead when you are looking for papers use academic databases not AI use Web of Science use Scopus Google Scholar there are different databases that can be used once you get to those databases use the right keyword combination then read the actual paper then extract your notes from your reading and add these sources to your reference manager immediately if you have ever asked AI to give you sources on something go back through those citations right now search each one in Google Scholar or the database you have access to if it does not appear please remove it immediately replace it with sources that you find through real database search do this quickly before it lands you in a bigger problem I'll see you in the next one