>Also one of the things AI is likely the least suited for.
I agree, if we are using the current idea of AI as language models.
But that’s very limiting. I’m old enough to remember when AI meant everything a human could do. Not just some subset that is being deceptively marketed as potentially the whole thing.
The thing is, we have plenty of examples where systems that are not labeled as ai vastly outperform humans at searching knowledge bases.
A google-like search tool would probably be all you need for citations if 1) Google hadn’t killed accuracy in favor of ad placement and 2) the rest of the world hadn’t poisoned the dataset in hopes of getting picked up by Google as a first page result.
Now the hard problem isn’t to search so much as to curate an un-polluted dataset.