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Incident 1309: Springer Nature Book 'Social, Ethical and Legal Aspects of Generative AI: Tools, Techniques and Systems' Reportedly Published With Numerous Purportedly Fabricated or Unverifiable Citations

Description: 'Social, Ethical and Legal Aspects of Generative AI: Tools, Techniques and Systems,' published by Springer Nature in June 2025, reportedly contains numerous purportedly untraceable academic citations. Independent analyses by multiple researchers allegedly found that a substantial share of references in certain chapters could not be verified, including citations to journals that do not exist. Citation patterns reportedly appear consistent with known large language model hallucination behaviors.

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Alleged: Unknown large language model developers and Unknown generative AI developers developed an AI system deployed by Srikanta Patnaik , Jair Minoro Abe , Kazumi Nakamatsu , Francesco Vigliarolo , Springer Nature and Unnamed chapter authors, which harmed Academic researchers , AI researchers , Readers of academic and technical publications , students and Epistemic integrity.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown large language models and Unknown generative AI systems

Incident Stats

Incident ID
1309
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-06-17
Editors
Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident OccurrencePublisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide
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Publisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide

Publisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide

thetimes.com

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Publisher under fire after ‘fake’ citations found in AI ethics guide
thetimes.com · 2025

One of the world's largest academic publishers is selling a book on the ethics of artificial intelligence research that appears to be riddled with fake citations, including references to journals that do not exist.

Academic publishing has r…

Variants

A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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