Mistral completley broke.

I just spent 3 days working on an academic paper with Mistral. I was feeding it relevent questions and I foolishly believed what it was saying. When I began to check the citations and footnotes I realised that 60% of them were completly made up. They were ficticous sources. The authors did not exist, the books did not exist, It was all a rabbit hole of its own making and I foolishly trusted it. I was only using it as I wanted to use an EU LLM as I am a "Buy from the EU" supporter.

I am having difficulty with this however. What is the point of making it up out of thin air and the apologising for it when cornered. Now I know its a short cut for help with an academic paper but for it to be a tissue of lies kind of broke me on the whole AI sphere. I had to start again and raw dog the whole thing so I could hand in something that had integrity.

Was it something I did?

Any thoughts anyone?