A Danish biologist was shocked to find that his name was referenced several times in a scientific paper about millipedes — referring to papers that simply didn’t exist. As Retraction Watch reports, Natural History Museum of Denmark myriapodologist Henrik Enghoff suspected the authors of the paper from China and Africa used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to dig up academic references — and as it turns out, his hunch was right. The offending paper was initially taken down by Preprints.org, a preprint archive run by the academic publisher MDPI, in June after Enghoff’s colleague, the University of Copenhagen’s David Richard Nash, notified editors of the errors. Now, the paper has seemingly resurfaced online, hallucinated references and all, on a different preprint platform called Research Square. It’s an infuriating new reality that should have any academic worried about how AI tech could erode the legitimacy of scientific research. Scientists have already demonstrated that services like ChatGPT have a worrying tendency to “hallucinate” scholarly citations. And it’s not just academia. Earlier this year, reporters at The Guardian noticed that the AI chatbot even made up entire articles with bylines of journalists who had never written these non-existent pieces. Then there was the lawyer who infamously used ChatGPT to come up with made-up court cases while doing research for his client’s case, a decision that backfired spectacularly. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse that could end up turning into a huge headache for researchers. “We will withdraw it immediately and add the authors of this preprint to our blacklist,”…Professor Caught Using ChatGPT When Scientific Paper Was Full of Errors