Does Clarivate understand what citations are for?

A month ago Clarivate announced a new yet-to-be-released product called Nexus: "Clarivate Nexus acts as a bridge between the convenience of AI and the rigor of academic libraries". This is a pitch to librarians who have correctly identified generative AI chatbots as purveyors of endless bullshit, but also know that students and some researchers are going to use them anyway. Clarivate tells us that we can patch up the fabrications of chatbots with reassuring terms like "trusted sources", "verified academic references", and "authoritative".

Looking more carefully at Clarivate's marketing material, what they are proposing suggests that Clarivate understands neither what citations are for nor why fabricated citations are a problem. This is somewhat surprising for the company that controls and manages such key parts of the scholarly publishing systems as the citation database Web of Science, scholarly publishing and indexing company ProQuest, and the Primo/Summon Central Discovery Index.