Good post. I imagine that citations are meant to be a good-faith demonstration that someone worked all of this out and isn't just guessing in general. The fear of bad AI citations is that the writer themselves didn't think all of this through and was relying on AI logic (which we already know is wobbly and fraught).

If we run with this idea, then it seems like the AI is kind of a breach of contract. Like discussing whether the bun you had for breakfast was really made by grandma or if it was made in a factory.

We have some notions of craft v mass produced in materials and media, but I don't think we have a really good way to think about mass production of ideas. That's going to be tricky, in part because being an intellectual has had it's own cache and status. Introducing mass production of ideas destabilizes that social economy.

Not sure what I think about that quite yet.