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Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

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Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#21

Post by ghaff »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #3
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

The legal system has a word to describe AI "slop" --- it is called "negligence". And as the remedy starts being applied (aka "liability"), the enthusiasm for AI will start to wane. I wouldn't be surprised if some businesses ban the use of AI --- starting with law firms.

I applaud your use of triple dashes to avoid automatic conversion to em dashes and being labeled an AI. Kudos!

This is a particular meme that I really don't like. I've used em-dashes routinely for years. Do I need to stop using them because various people assume they're an AI flag?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#22

Post by Isamu »

Someone commented here that hallucination is what LLMs do, it’s the designed mode of selecting statistically relevant model data that was built on the training set and then mashing it up for an output. The outcome is something that statistically resembles a real citation.

Creating a real citation is totally doable by a machine though, it is just selecting relevant text, looking up the title, authors, pages etc and putting that in canonical form. It’s just that LLMs are not currently doing the work we ask for, but instead something similar in form that may be good enough.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#23

Post by stefan_ »

shusaku wrote: post #9

Checking each citation one by one is quite critical in peer review, and of course checking a colleagues paper. I’ve never had to deal with AI slop, but you’ll definitely see something cited for the wrong reason. And just the other day during the final typesetting of a paper of mine I found the journal had messed up a citation (same journal / author but wrong work!)

Is it quite critical? Peer review is not checking homework, it's about the novel contribution presented. Papers will frequently cite related notable experiments or introduce a problem that as a peer reviewer in the field I'm already well familiar with. These paragraphs generate many citations but are the least important part of a peer review.

(People submitting AI slop should still be ostracized of course, if you can't be bothered to read it, why would you think I should)

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#24

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

llm_nerd wrote: post #19
jameshart wrote: post #7

Is the baseline assumption of this work that an erroneous citation is LLM hallucinated? Did they run the checker across a body of papers before LLMs were available and verify that there were no citations in peer reviewed papers that got authors or titles wrong?

People will commonly hold LLMs as unusable because they make mistakes. So do people. Books have errors. Papers have errors. People have flawed knowledge, often degraded through a conceptual game of telephone. Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty. People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of th…

Quoting myself from just last night because this comes up every time and doesn't always need a new write-up.

> You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#25

Post by [deleted] »

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #16

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.

[deleted]

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#27

Post by the_af »

llm_nerd wrote: post #19
jameshart wrote: post #7

Is the baseline assumption of this work that an erroneous citation is LLM hallucinated? Did they run the checker across a body of papers before LLMs were available and verify that there were no citations in peer reviewed papers that got authors or titles wrong?

People will commonly hold LLMs as unusable because they make mistakes. So do people. Books have errors. Papers have errors. People have flawed knowledge, often degraded through a conceptual game of telephone. Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty. People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of th…

LLM are a force multiplier of this kind of errors though. It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans.

Humans can do all of the above but it costs them more, and they do it more slowly. LLMs generate spam at a much faster rate.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#28

Post by dclowd9901 »

To me, this is exactly what LLMs are good for. It would be exhausting double checking for valid citations in a research paper. Fuzzy comparison and rote lookup seem primed for usage with LLMs.

Writing academic papers is exactly the _wrong_ usage for LLMs. So here we have a clear cut case for their usage and a clear cut case for their avoidance.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#29

Post by [deleted] »

Isamu wrote: post #22

Someone commented here that hallucination is what LLMs do, it’s the designed mode of selecting statistically relevant model data that was built on the training set and then mashing it up for an output. The outcome is something that statistically resembles a real citation. Creating a real citation is totally doable by a machine though, it is just selecting relevant text, looking up the title, authors, pages etc and pu…

[deleted]
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