Dead Reference

What is this?

Dead Reference is a short browser game about the gap between real research and AI hallucination.

You will read ten academic citations. Five are real. Five were fabricated by AI. Your job is to guess which ones actually exist.

It sounds simple. Most of them will fool you.

How to play

Each round shows you a single citation in APA format. Press Real or Fake (or use the keyboard: R or F). After each guess, you will see:

Whether you were right or wrong

Whether the citation is real or fabricated

A reflection explaining how to verify that type of citation

Those reflections are the point. The score is secondary.

Why does this exist?

AI hallucinates citations. Not occasionally. Routinely. The fabricated references look correct: real journals, plausible authors, DOI formats that follow the right conventions. They are designed to pass a quick glance. Most of them do.

The game does not teach you to spot fakes by reading them. You cannot spot a fake citation by reading it. You spot it by checking it. Each reflection teaches a specific verification method: how to resolve a DOI, how to search Crossref, how to use ORCID, how to check whether a journal exists in the ISSN Portal.

This is a Slow AI project. Slow AI is a newsletter and curriculum about critical AI literacy: knowing when to use AI and when to leave it alone. Dead Reference is one small exercise in that larger practice.

What makes it different

Most AI literacy tools talk about hallucination in the abstract. Dead Reference puts you inside it. You read a citation, you make a judgement, and then you learn exactly how to verify what you just read. The teaching happens between the guesses, not at the end.

The real citations include papers with titles like Pseudo-Profound Bullshit and Plasticenta and a study about strapping weighted tails onto chickens. The fake citations include papers in Nature Medicine and The Lancet with DOIs that follow every formatting convention perfectly. The game is harder than you think.

Credits

Design and concept: Sam Illingworth

Built for: Slow AI

Real citations are verified published works with resolving DOIs. Fake citations were crafted to be plausible but do not correspond to any published paper or book.

Find out more

theslowai.substack.com