AI Citation Creators

 A cautionary tale:

There is a fascinating study about how flint tools, how hard it would have been to clean them which might have lead to cross contamination and disease and hypothetically links this to the practice of discarding still workable tools.

Whitehead, A., Sinclair, A., & Scott, C. (2024). Cross-contamination via stone tool use: A pilot study of bifacial butchery tools. EXARC Journal, 2024(2). https://exarc.net/issue-2024-2/ea/cross-contamination-stone-tool

The article doesn't have a ready to use citation, creating citations is very formulaic and the sort of job I would imagine AI should be good at, whereas it is a pain to do manually, so I gave Perplexity the link and asked it to write me one. It came up with:

Underdown, S., & Scott, C. (2024). Cross-contamination via stone tool use: A pilot study of bifacial butchery tools. EXARC Journal, 2024(2). https://exarc.net/issue-2024-2/ea/cross-contamination-stone-tool

The wrong authors, I thought that was strange so I asked Grok the same question. It answered.

Winton, V., & Pope, M. (2024). Cross-Contamination via Stone Tool Use: A Pilot Study of Bifacial Butchery Tools. EXARC Journal, 2024(2)

Different wrong authors. 

A couple of other AI citation creators also failed. I have been caught out in the past, I hope not to be in the future by double checking everytime.