Jenna DeLuca felt confused and frustrated. It was spring 2025, and this science fair judge had just DQ’d — disqualified — another student project. It was for the same reason as several others. The teen’s project listed questionable research papers among its sources. For some, DeLuca says, “the title would be correct, the journal would be right, but the authors were wrong.” In other cases, she notes, the journal “didn’t even exist.” It was totally bogus.
She realized these fake citations had almost certainly come from a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Gemini. When AI-powered chatbots respond to questions, they sometimes provide made-up answers. These are known as hallucinations.
Any student project with fake citations is a big problem. But these projects were among the most important that the students had ever worked on. They were in the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) finals.
ISEF is so selective that it’s often called the Olympics of science fairs. To qualify, students must first win in a series of sm...
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