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GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

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Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#51

This suggests that nobody was screening this papers in the first place—so is it actually significant that people are using LLMs in a setting without meaningful oversight? These clearly aren't being peer-reviewed, so there's no natural check on LLM usage (which is different than what we see in work published in journals).

Academic venues don't have enough reviewers. This problem isn't new, and as publication volumes increase, it's getting sharply worse.

Consider the unit economics. Suppose NeurIPS gets 20,000 papers in one year. Suppose each author should expect three good reviews, so area chairs assign five reviewers per paper. In total, 100,000 reviews need to be written. It's a lot of work, even before factoring emergency reviewers in.

NeurIPS is one venue alongside CVPR, [IE]CCV, COLM, ICML, EMNLP, and so on. Not all of these conferences are as large as NeurIPS, but the field is smaller than you'd expect. I'd guess there are 300k-1m people in the world who are qualified to review AI papers.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#52
post #38
post #2

Yuck, this is going to really harm scientific research. There is already a problem with papers falsifying data/samples/etc, LLMs being able to put out plausible papers is just going to make it worse. On the bright side, maybe this will get the scientific community and science journalists to finally take reproducibility more seriously. I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing che…

For ML/AI/Comp sci articles, providing reproducible code is a great option. Basically, PoC or GTFO.

[deleted]

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#53
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harsh sentiment. Pretty soon every knowledge worker will use AI every day. Should people disclose spellcheckers powered by AI? Disclosing is not useful. Being careful in how you use it and checking work is what matters.

What they are doing is plain cheating the system to get their 3 conference papers so they can get their $150k+ job at FAANG. It's plain cheating with no value.

Cheating by people in high status positions should get the hammer. But it gets the hand-wringing what-have-we-come-to treatment instead.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#54
post #2

Yuck, this is going to really harm scientific research. There is already a problem with papers falsifying data/samples/etc, LLMs being able to put out plausible papers is just going to make it worse. On the bright side, maybe this will get the scientific community and science journalists to finally take reproducibility more seriously. I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing che…

It will better expose the behaviour of false scientists.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#55
post #28

NeurIPS leadership doesn’t think hallucinated references are necessarily disqualifying; see the full article from Fortune for a statement from them: https://archive.ph/yizHN > When reached for comment, the NeurIPS board shared the following statement: “The usage of LLMs in papers at AI conferences is rapidly evolving, and NeurIPS is actively monitoring developments. In previous years, we piloted policies regarding th…

Kinda gives the whole game away, doesn’t it? “It doesn’t actually matter if the citations are hallucinated.” In fairness, NeurIPS is just saying out loud what everyone already knows. Most citations in published science are useless junk: it’s either mutual back-scratching to juice h-index, or it’s the embedded and pointless practice of overcitation, like “Human beings need clean water to survive (Franz, 2002)”. Really…

There should be a way to drop any kind of circular citation ring from the indexes.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#57
This is awful but hardly surprising. Someone mentioned reproducible code with the papers - but there is a high likelihood of the code being partially or fully AI generated as well. I.e. AI generated hypothesis -> AI produces code to implement and execute the hypothesis -> AI generates paper based on the hypothesis and the code.

Also: there were 15 000 submissions that were rejected at NeurIPS; it would be very interesting to see what % of those rejected were partially or fully AI generated/hallucinated. Are the ratios comperable?

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#58
post #28

NeurIPS leadership doesn’t think hallucinated references are necessarily disqualifying; see the full article from Fortune for a statement from them: https://archive.ph/yizHN > When reached for comment, the NeurIPS board shared the following statement: “The usage of LLMs in papers at AI conferences is rapidly evolving, and NeurIPS is actively monitoring developments. In previous years, we piloted policies regarding th…

I think a _single_ instance of an LLM hallucination should be enough to retract the whole paper and ban further submissions.

Going through a retraction and blacklisting process is also a lot of work -- collecting evidence, giving authors a chance to respond and mediate discussion, etc.

Labor is the bottleneck. There aren't enough academics who volunteer to help organize conferences.

(If a reader of this comment is qualified to review papers and wants to step up to the plate and help do some work in this area, please email the program chairs of your favorite conference and let them know. They'll eagerly put you to work.)

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#59
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All 3 of these should be categorized as fraud, and punished criminally.

criminally feels excessive?

You could make a good case for a white collar crime here, fraud for instance.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#60
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

criminally feels excessive?

If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate? To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.

We have a civil court system to handle stuff like this already.
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