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Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

(gptzero.me)
504 points puttycat | 2 comments | 07 Dec 25 13:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.391s | source
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ulrashida ◴[07 Dec 25 16:12 UTC] No.46182750[source]▶
Unfortunately while catching false citations is useful, in my experience that's not usually the problem affecting paper quality. Far more prevalent are authors who mis-cite materials, either drawing support from citations that don't actually say those things or strip the nuance away by using cherry picked quotes simply because that is what Google Scholar suggested as a top result.

The time it takes to find these errors is orders of magnitude higher than checking if a citation exists as you need to both read and understand the source material.

These bad actors should be subject to a three strikes rule: the steady corrosion of knowledge is not an accident by these individuals.

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1. potato3732842 ◴[07 Dec 25 22:22 UTC] No.46185867[source]▶
>These bad actors should be subject to a three strikes rule: the steady corrosion of knowledge is not an accident by these individuals.

These people are working in labs funded by Exxon or Meta or Pfizer or whoever and they know what results will make continued funding worthwhile in the eyes of their donors. If the lab doesn't produce the donor will fund another one that will.

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2. mike_hearn ◴[08 Dec 25 08:36 UTC] No.46189851[source]▶
No, not really. I've read lots of research papers from commercial firms and academic labs. Bad citations are something I only ever saw in academic papers.

I think that's because a lot of bad citations come from reviewer demands to add more of them during the journal publishing process, so they're not critical to the argument and end up being low effort citations that get copy/pasted between papers. Or someone is just spamming citations to make a weak claim look strong. And all this happens because academic uses citations as a kind of currency (it's a planned non-market economy, so they have to allocate funds using proxy signals).

Commercial labs are less likely to care about the journal process to begin with, and are much less likely to publish weak claims because publishing is just a recruiting tool, not the actual end goal of the R&D department.