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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

#221

Post by coryrc »

parpfish wrote: post #158
vld_chk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mental model, the fundamental problem of reproducibility is that scientists have very hard time to find a penny to fund such research. No one wants to grant “hey I need $1m and 2 years to validate the paper from last year which looks suspicious”. Until we can change how we fund science on the fundamental level; how we assign grants — it will be indeed very hard problem to deal with.

In theory, asking grad students and early career folks to run replications would be a great training tool. But the problem isn’t just funding, it’s time. Successfully running a replication doesn’t get you a publication to help your career.

Enough people will falsify the replication and pocket the money, taking you back to where you were in the first place and poorer for it. The loss of trust is an existential problem for the USA.

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

#222

Post by godelski »

Given that many of these detections are being made from references, I don't understand why we're not using automatic citation checkers.

Just ask authors to submit their bib file so we don't need to do OCR on the PDF. Flag the unknown citations and ask reviewers to verify their existence. Then contact authors and ban if they can't produce the cited work.

This is low hanging fruit here!

Detecting slop where the authors vet citations is much harder. The big problem with all the review rules is they have no teeth. If it were up to me we'd review in the open, or at least like ICLR. Publish the list of known bad actors and let is look at the network. The current system is too protective of egregious errors like plagiarism. Authors can get detected in one conference, pull, and submit to another, rolling the dice. We can't allow that to happen and we should discourage people from associating with these conartists.

AI is certainly a problem in the world of science review, but it's far from the only one and I'm not even convinced it's the biggest. The biggest is just that reviewers are lazy and/or not qualified to review the works they're assigned. It takes at least an hour to properly review a paper in your niche, much more when it's outside. We're over worked as is, with 5+ works to review, not to mention all the time we got to spend reworking our own works that were rejected due to the slot machine. We could do much better if we dropped this notion of conference/journal prestige and focused on the quality of the works and reviews.

Addressing those issues also addresses the AI issues because, frankly, *it doesn't matter if the whole work was done by AI, what matters is if the work is real.*

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

#223

Post by pacbard »

The ironic part about these hallucinations is that a research paper includes a literature review because the goal of the research is to be in dialogue with prior work, to show a gap in the existing literature, and to further the knowledge that this prior work has built.

By using an LLM to fabricate citations, authors are moving away from this noble pursuit of knowledge built on the "shoulders of giants" and show that behind the curtain output volume is what really matters in modern US research communities.

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

#224

Post by andy_xor_andrew »

pacbard wrote: post #223

The ironic part about these hallucinations is that a research paper includes a literature review because the goal of the research is to be in dialogue with prior work, to show a gap in the existing literature, and to further the knowledge that this prior work has built. By using an LLM to fabricate citations, authors are moving away from this noble pursuit of knowledge built on the "shoulders of giants" and show that…

I guess that makes this "standing on the shoulders of fabrications"

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

#225

Post by eks-reigh »

parpfish wrote: post #158
vld_chk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mental model, the fundamental problem of reproducibility is that scientists have very hard time to find a penny to fund such research. No one wants to grant “hey I need $1m and 2 years to validate the paper from last year which looks suspicious”. Until we can change how we fund science on the fundamental level; how we assign grants — it will be indeed very hard problem to deal with.

In theory, asking grad students and early career folks to run replications would be a great training tool. But the problem isn’t just funding, it’s time. Successfully running a replication doesn’t get you a publication to help your career.

You may well know this, but I get the sense that it isn’t necessarily common knowledge, so I want to spell it out anyway:

In a lot of cases, the salary for a grad student or tech is small potatoes next to the cost of the consumables they use in their work.

For example,I work for a lab that does a lot of sequencing, and if we’re busy one tech can use 10k worth of reagents in a week.

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

#226

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

ctoth wrote: post #213

The innumeracy is load-bearing for the entire media ecosystem. If readers could do basic proportional reasoning, half of health journalism and most tech panic coverage would collapse overnight. GPTZero of course knows this. "100 hallucinations across 53 papers at prestigious conference" hits different than "0.07% of citations had issues, compared to unknown baseline, in papers whose actual findings remain valid."

I’m not sure that’s fair in this context.

In the past, a single paper with questionable or falsified results at a top tier conference was big news.

Something that casts doubt on the validity of 53 papers at a top AI conference is at least notable.

> whose actual findings remain valid

Remain valid according to who? The same group that missed hundreds of hallucinated citations?

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

#227

Post by ihaveajob »

Kinrany wrote: post #216
goalieca wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grad students don’t get to publish a thesis on reproduction. Everyone from the undergraduate research assistant to the tenured professor with research chairs are hyper focused on “publishing” as much “positive result” on “novel” work as possible

Publishing a replication could be a prerequisite to getting the degree The question is, how can universities coordinate to add this requirement and gain status from it

I think Arxiv and similar could contribute positively by listing replications/falsifications, with credit to the validating authors. That would be enough of an incentive for aspiring researchers to start making a dent.

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

#228

Post by colechristensen »

cogman10 wrote: 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…

Reading the article, this is about CITATIONS which are trivially verifiable.

This is just article publishers not doing the most basic verification failing to notice that the citations in the article don't exist.

What this should trigger is a black mark for all of the authors and their institutions, both of which should receive significant reputational repercussions for publishing fake information. If they fake the easiest to verify information (does the cited work exist) what else are they faking?

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