ChatGPT fabricates academic citations for biologist Henrik Enghoff
A scientific preprint about millipedes, authored using ChatGPT, included several fake academic references attributed to biologist Henrik Enghoff. Enghoff discovered the fabrications when he noticed his name linked to papers he had never written.
The citations were botched, and some papers he was supposed to have written didn't exist.
Key facts
- What
- A scientific preprint about millipedes, authored using ChatGPT, included several fake academic references attributed to biologist Henrik Enghoff.
- Incident date
- Sep 1, 2023
- Who
- OpenAI
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
A scientific preprint regarding millipedes was published using OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate content and references. The AI fabricated several academic citations, falsely attributing non-existent papers to biologist Henrik Enghoff. Enghoff discovered the errors upon reviewing the paper and alerted the community, leading to the preprint's withdrawal.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The LLM suffered from hallucinations, a failure mode where the model generates plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information. The model synthesized fake bibliographic entries by combining real author names with fabricated titles and journal details.
What it cost
Sources
- PressProfessor Caught Using ChatGPT When Scientific Paper Was Full of Errorsfuturism.com
- PressWithdrawn AI-written preprint on millipedes resurfaces, causing alarmretractionwatch.com
- PressAIAAIC - ChatGPT invents Henrik Enghoff academic citationsaiaaic.org
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/chatgpt-fabricates-academic-citations-biologist-henrikAI Failure Index. "ChatGPT fabricates academic citations for biologist Henrik Enghoff" (FI-0515). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/chatgpt-fabricates-academic-citations-biologist-henrik (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0515. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
A runtime layer that watches the model's internal state can flag the moment a model commits to a claim it has no support for, and hold or reroute the response before it reaches a user. Realm reads those signals in real time rather than grading the transcript after the fact.