Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

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.

The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. They are also assuming good faith.

You'll find a lot of papers from, say, the '70s, with a grand total of maybe 10 references, all of them to crucial prior work, and if those references don't say what the author claims they should say (e.g. that the particular method that is employed is valid), then chances are that the current paper is weaker than it seems, or even invalid, and so it is extremely important to check those references.

Then the internet came along, scientists started padding their work with easily found but barely relevant references and journal editors started requiring that even "the earth is round" should be well-referenced. The result is that peer reviewers feel that asking them to check the references is akin to asking them to do a spell check. Fair enough, I agree, I usually can't be bothered to do many or any citation checks when I am asked to do peer review, but it's good to remember that this in itself is an indication of a perverted system, which we just all ignored -- at our peril -- until LLM hallucinations upset the status quo.

In the methods section, it's very common to say "We employ method barfoo [1] as implemented in library libbar [2], with the specific variant widget due to Smith et al. [3] and the gobbledygook renormalization [4,5]. The feoozbar is solved with geometric multigrid [6]. Data is analyzed using the froiznok method [7] from the boolbool library [8]." There goes 8, now you have 2 citations left for the introduction.