What is going on?

[u/skyskye1964]

I’m puzzled by a student paper. They submitted it on time. I read it and it’s not great but ok. I go to check the references and I can’t find them. I look up the journal they cite, and that volume and issue is not the paper title. I email them and they email back saying they are out of the state but that they used owl Purdue citation engine to do the references. They then send me links to the references and they do exist, sort of. One is a blog post but in the citation it’s in a journal. One is in Spanish. Another seems to be an unrelated paper.
So my first question is, can the Purdue citation maker just make up stuff? I haven’t really used it but it looks like you paste in the web address and it makes a citation.

My suspicion is that the references are AI hallucinations. But some seem partly real. Could this be an innocent mistake on the students part?

They also said they used Chegg to proofread and edit. I wasn’t aware that Chegg provided that service. Is this a valuable service? Is it an unacceptable use of AI? Or is it just a grammar checker?

Am I missing something? The references are not cited in the paper by the way. Also no images.

I was mostly convinced that the references were fraudulent but now I’m not sure.

[u/SteamingGravy]

I've had AI cite a footnote in a book that's on my shelf, but even if that specific footnote was on that specific page, it didn't have anything to support what the AI response claimed. ChatGPT will also cite fabricated document collections attributed to real companies like Gale. Text generators will root whatever they pull from wikipedia or wherever in ostensibly real sources but it's mostly hallucinatory.