If the guy asks to “help find citations” and there are no actual good ones
When it comes for getting LLMs to help with citations I usually put the LLM in Deep Research mode and ask: “Can you do background research about the claims in this paragraph?” This does manage to reveal when claims in the paragraph are out of touch with the actual research in the field and provides good citations which you wouldn’t get if you ask directly for citations.
If you have what feels like an original idea and there’s a scientific field touching it while you are a lay person, running these kinds of deep research queries is probably a good idea even if you write all the actual words yourself. There are plenty of blog posts where a person has their own idea that has shown to have flaws in actual research or the actual research has already found great terminology for it.
When it comes for getting LLMs to help with citations I usually put the LLM in Deep Research mode and ask: “Can you do background research about the claims in this paragraph?” This does manage to reveal when claims in the paragraph are out of touch with the actual research in the field and provides good citations which you wouldn’t get if you ask directly for citations.
If you have what feels like an original idea and there’s a scientific field touching it while you are a lay person, running these kinds of deep research queries is probably a good idea even if you write all the actual words yourself. There are plenty of blog posts where a person has their own idea that has shown to have flaws in actual research or the actual research has already found great terminology for it.