Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

If a carpenter builds a crappy shelf “because” his power tools are not calibrated correctly - that’s a crappy carpenter, not a crappy tool.

If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist.

AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is. There needs to be serious social consequences to this kind of thing, otherwise we are tacitly endorsing it.

To continue the carpenter analogy, the issue with LLMs is that the shelf looks great but is structurally unsound. That it looks good on surface inspection makes it harder to tell that the person making it had no idea what they're doing.

Regardless, if a carpenter is not validating their work before selling it, it's the same as if a researcher doesn't validate their citations before publishing. Neither of them have any excuses, and one isn't harder to detect than the other. It's just straight up laziness regardless.

I think this is a bit unfair. The carpenters are (1) living in world where there’s an extreme focus on delivering as quicklyas possible, (2) being presented with a tool which is promised by prominent figures to be amazing, and (3) the tool is given at a low cost due to being subsidized.

And yet, we’re not supposed to criticize the tool or its makers? Clearly there’s more problems in this world than «lazy carpenters»?

Yes, that's what it means to be a professional, you take responsibility for the quality of your work.

It's a shame the slop generators don't ever have to take responsibility for the trash they've produced.

That's beside the point. While there may be many reasonable critiques of AI, none of them reduce the responsibilities of scientist.

>While there many reasonable critiques of AI

But you just said we weren’t supposed to criticize the purveyors of AI or the tools themselves.

No, I merely said that the scientist is the one responsible for the quality of their own work. Any critiques you may have for the tools which they use don't lessen this responsibility.

>No, I merely said that the scientist is the one responsible for the quality of their own work.

No, you expressed unqualified agreement with a comment containing

“And yet, we’re not supposed to criticize the tool or its makers?”

>Any critiques you may have for the tools which they use don't lessen this responsibility.

People don’t exist or act in a vacuum. That a scientist is responsible for the quality of their work doesn’t mean that a spectrometer manufacture that advertises specs that their machines can’t match and induces universities through discounts and/or dubious advertising claims to push their labs to replace their existing spectrometers with new ones which have many bizarre and unexpected behaviors including but not limited to sometimes just fabricating spurious readings has made no contribution to the problem of bad results.