Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

This is as much a failing of "peer review" as anything. Importantly, it is an intrinsic failure, which won't go away even if LLMs were to go away completely.

Peer review doesn't catch errors.

Acting as if it does, and thus assuming the fact of publication (and where it was published) are indicators of veracity is simply unfounded. We need to go back to the food fight system where everyone publishes whatever they want, their colleagues and other adversaries try their best to shred them, and the winners are the ones that stand up to the maelstrom. It's messy, but it forces critics to put forth their arguments rather than quietly gatekeeping, passing what they approve of, suppressing what they don't.

Peer review definitely does catch errors when performed by qualified individuals. I've personally flagged papers for major revisions or rejection as a result of errors in approach or misrepresentation of source material. I have peers who say they have done similar.

I'm not sure why you think this isn't the case?

Peer review is as useless as code review and unit tests, yes.

It's much more useful if everyone including the janitor and their mom can have a say on your code before you're allowed to move to your next commit.

(/s, in case it's not obvious :D )

Peer review was never supposed to check every single detail and every single citation. They are not proof readers. They are not even really supposed to agree or disagree with your results. They should check the soundness of a method, general structure of a paper, that sort of thing. They do catch some errors, but the expectation is not to do another independent study or something.

Passed peer review is the first basic bar that has to be cleared. It was never supposed to be all there is to the science.

I don’t think many researchers take peer review alone as a strong signal, unless it is a venue known for having serious reviewing (e.g. in CS theory, STOC and FOCS have a very high bar). But it acts as a basic filter that gets rid of obvious nonsense, which on its own is valuable. No doubt there are huge issues, but I know my papers would be worse off without reviewer feedback

No, it's not "as much".

The dominant "failing" here is that this is fraudulent on a professional, intellectual, and moral level.

It would be crazy to expect them to verify every author is correct on a citation and to cross verify everything. There’s tooling that could be built for that and kinda wild isn’t a thing that’s run on paper submission.

Poor wording on my part.

I should have said "Peer review doesn't catch _all_ errors" or perhaps "Peer review doesn't eliminate errors".

In other words, being "peer reviewed" is nowhere close to "error free," and if (as is often the case) the rate of errors is significantly greater than the rate at which errors are caught, peer review may not even significantly improve the quality.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/

Agreed. But too often it's treated as a golden ticket confirmation of veracity, giving the process more epistemological authority than it warrants.

Thanks for clarifying, I fully agree with your take. Peer review helps, particularly where reviewers are equipped and provided the time to do the role correctly.

However, it is not alone a guarantor of quality. As someone proximate to academia its becoming obvious that many professors are beginning to throw in the towel or are sharply reducing their time verifying quality when faced with the rising tide of slop.

The window for avoiding the natural consequences of these trends feels like it is getting scarily small.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!