Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

gptzero.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 442 posts

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#71

Post by grayhatter »

andy99 wrote: post #48
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an industrial electrician. A lot of poor electrical work is visible only to a fellow electrician, and sometimes only another industrial electrician. Bad technical work requires technical inspectors to criticize. Sometimes highly skilled ones.

I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…

> 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.

I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?

> They are also assuming good faith.

I can only relate this to code review, but assuming good faith means you assume they didn't try to introduce a bug by adding this dependency. But I would should still check to make sure this new dep isn't some typosquatted package. That's the rigor I'm responsible for.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#72

Post by thaumasiotes »

zwnow wrote: post #50
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist. Really? Regardless of whether it's a good paper?

How is it a good paper if the info in it cant be trusted lmao

Whether the information in the paper can be trusted is an entirely separate concern.

Old Chinese mathematics texts are difficult to date because they often purport to be older than they are. But the contents are unaffected by this. There is a history-of-math problem, but there's no math problem.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#73

Post by belter »

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.

"...each of which were missed by 3-5 peer reviewers..."

Its sloppy work all the way down...

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#74

Post by sigmoid10 »

miniwark wrote: post #20
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?

They explain in the article what they consider a proper citation, an erroneous one and an hallucination, in the section "Defining Hallucitations". They also say than they have many false positives, mostly real papers who are not available online. Thad said, i am also very curious of the result than their tool, would give to papers from the 2010's and before.

If you look at their examples in the "Defining Hallucitations" section, I'd say those could be 100% human errors. Shortening authors' names, leaving out authors, misattributing authors, misspelling or misremembering the paper title (or having an old preprint-title, as titles do change) are all things that I would fully expect to happen to anyone in any field were things get ever got published. Modern tools have made the citation process more comfortable, but if you go back to the old days, you'd probably find those kinds of errors everywhere. If you look at the full list of "hallucinations" they claim to have discovered, the only ones I'd not immediately blame on human screwups are the ones where a title and the authors got zero matches for existing papers/people. If you really want to do this kind of analysis correctly, you'd have to match the claim of the text and verify it with the cited article. Because I think it would be even more dangerous if you can get claims accepted by simply quoting an existing paper correctly, while completely ignoring its content (which would have worked here).

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#75

Post by analog31 »

tomrod wrote: post #14

How sloppy is someone that they don't check their references!

A reference is included in a paper if the paper uses information derived from the reference, or to acknowledges the reference as a prior source. If the reference is fake, then the derived information could very well be fake.

Let's say that I use a formula, and give a reference to where the formula came from, but the reference doesn't exist. Would you trust the formula?

Let's say a computer program calls a subroutine with a certain name from a certain library, but the library doesn't exist.

A person doing good research doesn't need to check their references. Now, they could stand to check the references for typographic errors, but that's a stretch too. Almost every online service for retrieving articles includes a reference for each article that you can just copy and paste.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#77

Post by grayhatter »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #70

After an interview with Cory Doctorow I saw recently, I'm going to stop anthropomorphizing these things by calling them "hallucinations". They're computers, so these incidents are just simply Errors.

I'll continue calling them hallucinations. That's a much more fitting term when you account for the reasonableness of people who believe them. There's also equally a huge breadth of different types of errors that don't pattern match well into, "made up bullshit" the same way calling them hallucinations do. There's no need to introduce that ambiguity when discussing something narrow.

there's nothing wrong with anthropomorphizing genai, it's source material is human sourced, and humans are going to use human like pattern matching when interacting with it. I.e. This isn't the river I want to swim upstream in. I assume you wouldn't complain if someone anthropomorphized a rock... up until they started to believe it was actually alive.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#78

Post by the8472 »

hansmayer wrote: post #51
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.

Scientists who use LLMs to write a paper are crappy scientists indeed. They need to be held accountable, even ostracised by the scientific community. But something is missing from the picture. Why is it that they came up with this idea in the first place? Who could have been peddling the impression (not an outright lie - they are very careful) about LLMs being these almost sentient systems with emergent intelligence,…

> Where is the god damn cure for cancer the LLMs were supposed to invent?

Assuming that cure is meant as hyperbole, how about https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.14.648850v3 ? AI models being used for bad purposes doesn't preclude them being used for good purposes.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#79

Post by chroma205 »

grayhatter wrote: post #71
andy99 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…

> 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. I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? > They are also assuming good faith. I can only relate this to…

> I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?

No.

Modern peer review is “how can I do minimum possible work so I can write ‘ICLR Reviewer 2025’ on my personal website”

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#80

Post by embedding-shape »

judofyr wrote: post #65
embedding-shape wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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»?

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

Exactly, they're not forcing anyone to use these things, but sometimes others (their managers/bosses) forced them to. Yet it's their responsibility for choosing the right tool for the right problem, like any other professional.

If a carpenter shows up to put a roof yet their hammer or nail-gun can't actually put in nails, who'd you blame; the tool, the toolmaker or the carpenter?

Post reply on HN