Osmanovic Thunström and her colleagues made it very obvious, sprinkling the fictitious studies with things like funding from the Galactic Triad and Lord of the Rings, as well as appreciation of colleagues at the Starship Enterprise and Professor Ross Geller, per “Science Quickly.” At least one of the papers even explicitly stated, “This entire paper is made up,” reports Nature.

Ultimately, the project confirms that these LLMs take their information from the internet, and the internet contains a lot of misinformation. Humans, therefore, should be more critical of A.I. outputs.

“Misinformation has always existed,” write Goodman and Rashid for the Conversation. “What’s new is the speed at which it spreads, the tools that generate it and how convincingly it mimics the real thing.”