AI

You’d think that adding a citation to an AI’s answer would make it more trustworthy. A link to a scientific paper. A reference to a legal precedent. A footnote pointing to a medical journal. Surely the AI has checked its sources, right?

Wrong. A landmark new study accepted at ICML 2026 — one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences — reveals something deeply counterintuitive: citations make large language models more likely to hallucinate, not less.

There’s a quiet unease that comes with using AI these days. Not the fear that it will take your job or go rogue — something subtler. It’s the sense that after spending hours with these systems, you start to think a little differently. Your questions become more like prompts. Your internal monologue sounds more like a chatbot. You catch yourself writing in bullet points.

A new paper from researchers across Union College, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, and Lenovo asks whether this feeling is more than just a feeling. They call it cognitive colonization.