Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

I recommend actually clicking through and reading some of these papers.

Most of those I spot checked do not give an impression of high quality. Not just AI writing assistance but many seem to have AI-generated "ideas", often plausible nonsense. the reviewers often catch the errors and sometimes even the fake citations.

can I prove malfeasance beyond a reasonable doubt? no. but I personally feel quite confident many of the papers I checked are primarily AI-generated.

I feel really bad for any authors who submitted legitimate work but made an innocent mistake in their .bib and ended up on the same list as the rest of this stuff.

To me such an interpretation suggests there are likely to be papers that were not so easy to spot, perhaps because the AI accidentally happened upon more plausible nonsense and then generated fully non-sense data, which was believable but still (at a reduced level of criticality) nonsense data, to bolster said non-sense theory at a level that is less easy to catch.

This isn't comforting at all.