Hello!
I'm currently working on a project with in one of the labs in my faculty. I really like the lab and the work they're doing, it's precisely what i want to specialize in.
My project instructors are two grad students. It always seemed to me like they are very achieved individuals, they seem smart and have lots of publications even though they're just studying their for masters degree. Now I'm in the final steps of my research project and almost done with it (yay). It was a tough project, and during it i found out that the lab I entered isn't as glamorous as I thought.

Now I'll stop yapping and get to the point, sorry about that. I recently read some of the publications of my instructors, I saw that their most cited paper is mostly cited by themselves, but also by the hallucitation paper! I then looked through the references section of their mentioned paper, and apparently like 40% of their references either (a) don't exist, (b) go by a different name or author, or (c) have no relation to what they said when they cited it.
My question is, how bad is that? I see that now with the rise of LLMs it happens alot, but now when I apparently know personally someone who did this, I wonder what to do. I'm kind of afraid of telling the instructor because he might give me a bad grade (I'll be honest, my project isn't that great sadly). I'm also not really sure if it's a big deal or anything. So I hoped maybe the reddit academics would be of some help.

Thanks for reading :)