One of the reported hallucinations in this work [1], starting with David Rein, says the other authors are entirely made up. They are indeed absent from the original cited paper [2], but a Google search shows some of the same names featured in citations from other papers [3] [4].

Most of the names in these wrong attributions are actual people though, not hallucinations. What is going on? Is this a case of AI-powered citation management creating some weird feedback loop?

[1] https://app.gptzero.me/documents/54c8aa45-c97d-48fc-b9d0-d49...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.12022

[3] https://arxiv.org/html/2509.22536v3

[4] https://arxiv.org/html/2511.01191v1