Detecting AI Hallucinated Citations

After four weeks off with the lurgy (once again I know, I know I am on an NHS waiting list ….) and then Christmas holidays, family visit and loads of rest, I needed to get my brain back in gear. Enter a JISC Mail discussion about hallucinated citations or hallucinated references when using AI. Apparently there is nothing out there that is either trustworthy or affordable.

So I figured I can try and build something? Right? What can go wrong? Well besides my laptop running too hot. And don’t get me started on deployment. But with the help of AI (Gemini Pro using its API) I managed to come up with something that identifies hallucinated references, even references that Gemini Pro has hallucinated itself.

Test

Gemini in a result suggested this reference:

Paper: “Nudge and the Manipulation of Choice” (Hausman & Welch, 2010)

The test I ran via the Gemini Pro API based program said:

screenshot of analysis report saying this source is fake and explains that the article is a mesh of real and hallucinated

An accurate citation results like this

REAL (Confidence: 1.0)
The citation details, including author, chapter title, book title, publisher, year, and page numbers, are accurate and match existing academic records for a chapter in the 'Handbook of Behavioural Change and Public Policy' published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2019.

Try yourself

The Render based website you can use, keep in mind I am using free versions so I recommend not checking more than 20 resources at one time. ENTER between each resource.

https://truth-serum-nathalietasler.onrender.com/

if this is too much hassle you can use this Gem instead

https://gemini.google.com/gem/1ZiYr3pn5f10Oc8Nw6Qz5t2osd7e43hhc?usp=sharing

PS let me know if the Render website has an issue, I had to update the code and the API it used but I think all the bugs are now fixed.


Comments

4 responses to “Detecting AI Hallucinated Citations”

  1. I’ve seen this problem firsthand. Tools like this are useful because AI sounding confident is exactly what makes hallucinated citations dangerous. Verification still matters.

  2. This is probably one of the most useful things I’ve seen for academic work. Thanks for sharing!

  3. Peter Coogan Avatar
    Peter Coogan

    This is fantastic. I edit dissertations, so I have to check references all the time. This will speed up identifying AI hallucinations.

    1. Brilliant, I am glad this works for you!

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Dr Nathalie Tasler

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading