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> Why are you writing papers and not having actually read the source you took the material from?

They're explicitly not writing papers. The fake citations are created and inserted by the LLM

They are still purposely writing a paper, whether that is with the help of an LLM or not. They are instructing the LLM to do the task of finding citations. It's no difference to googling for a paper that explains a specific point. You would still double check Google's output.

So you just write whatever you want, then find a source for it later? I don't think you understand how this is supposed to work

I understand how it is supposed to work, but myself and many other academics do consider wanting to write a certain point and then look for a paper that backs that up. I am not saying for the main subject matter that should be done; that should be read prior to starting, say when conducting a literature review on the current research. However sometimes you find yourself writing up at the end and you found a result in your experiment that had a surprising output and you want to have a reference to explain it or back that, that you hadn't considered before. It is especially done that way as it is a time saver as you can't nowadays realistically read every paper on an area as there are too many. The above method works just fine, but you do actually have to check that it covers what you are wanting. You can not just use an LLM and not check if it is correct. Likewise I can't just ask a colleague and not check it is correct.

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