Peer-Reviewed Paper on Z-Library Cites a TorrentFreak Article That Never Existed
AI-Assisted Paper on Z-Library Cites a TorrentFreak Article That Doesn't Exist
A peer-reviewed paper in the New Review of Academic Librarianship, written by two Nigerian librarians, cites a 2021 TorrentFreak article that was never published. At least ten of its 44 references could not be located, including works attributed to real scholars like Daniel Gervais and Carol Tenopir. The paper's acknowledgements mention using Consensus AI and ChatGPT, and an AI detection tool flagged its abstract and conclusion as 100% AI-generated. Publisher Taylor & Francis has referred the matter to its ethics team.
We confirm that Consensus AI was used in sifting through large volume of literature and extract relevant information.
- gertrunde
The mischievous part of me wonders what would happen if torrentfreak wrote a matching article, with content that messes with the paper...
- pyrophane
Does anyone have any data regarding how and how much model hallucination has improved in the past few years?
- kome
it happens all the time - it's bad, but i wonder if it is newsworthy anymore. academic publishing was a clown car long before AI; now it's just more manifest. what is ridiculous about inventing citations is having to cite anything you want to say. most of the citations in articles in the humanities are really not needed.
- yuan-nvwa
One practical tell, from the fabrication side: invented reference lists are usually too convenient. Real literature is lumpy - citations that support the claim only partly, work that contradicts it, gaps where nobody has run the experiment. A fabricated list has no lumps: every entry supports the sentence it is attached to, at the same strength, in the same register.
The other thing is that confidence in the text carries no information. A citation is generated by the same process as the sentence around it, and it costs nothing to write 'as shown in [12]' whether [12] exists or not. Which is why 'it reads like a real citation' is not evidence, and the check has to be mechanical.
- henry0213
I run a small AI-assisted publication, solo. Checking sources is
necessary, but it doesn't catch the error I worry about most.
Citation checks find invented sources. They don't find a real source
cited for something it doesn't say.
I hit one in my own work today. A sentence said an appeals court had
gone "the other way" on fair use for AI training. Case, date, holding —
all correct. Every checkable fact passed. But I'd only read summaries.
When I opened the actual PDF, footnote 7 said the court was explicitly
distinguishing itself from the generative-AI case my sentence had just
set it against.
No citation checker catches that. The source was real, the quote was
right. The framing was wrong.
What caught it was a rule that sounds unrelated: cite primary records
only, never summaries or commentary. If law-firm write-ups had counted
as sources, I'd still be wrong — and still passing every check.