Do citations make AI answers trustworthy?
Design it like this
Link each claim to its source inline and make checking one click; don't treat a citation list as proof.
What the research says
An audit of generative search engines found that many statements weren't fully backed by citations, and some citations didn't support their sentence. Answers that looked fluent were often less well supported.
“on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence.”
Liu et al., 2023
Sources
- Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines2023 · Findings of EMNLP 2023 · Nelson F. Liu, Tianyi Zhang, Percy Liang
“on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence.”
Abstract