Irrelevant Reference
🚧 Under construction
This entry is a placeholder — the canonical write-up is still in progress and may be incomplete or change substantially. Please don't treat it as final or authoritative yet.
Definition
An irrelevant reference is a citation to a real case that the AI describes accurately — but that simply isn't germane to the proposition it is cited for: a non-sequitur. Unlike a pure hallucination, a mutant / synthetic citation, or a hallucinated summary, nothing about the case itself is fabricated — the failure is one of relevance. It is the subtlest type to catch, because both "does the case exist?" and "is the summary accurate?" pass.
Why it matters
Worked examples
Cases that exemplify this failure mode
- Garner v. Kadince (Utah Court of Appeals, 2025) — 1 instance