I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals • Hacker News Board

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#31

Post by attila-lendvai » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

boplicity wrote: post #17

jsrozner wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk if we're automating humans out of the publishing loop as much as rapidly automating the production of crap. I had a very similar experience reviewing for EMNLP recently. We are nowhere near AI being able to judge the quality of research (in fact, one might reasonably state that even most humans can't really judge the quality of research). Most things in society are not like math: we can't automate (via verificati…

> draconian social scoring This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How? In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometim…

in short: our social sructure has built out so far beyond the Dunbar's number that it has become a haven for psychopaths.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#32

Post by JumpCrisscross » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

nneonneo wrote: post #2

At this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are…

> We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop

We are rendering it irrelevant. If this is the norm for academia, I’m sympathetic to the folks looking to cut its funding.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#33

Post by 5555watch » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #3

nneonneo wrote: post #2

At this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are…

We just need journals run by an AI that charges other AI to read them, and then the AI run colleges can promote the AI with the most AI journal entries and citations.

I wonder into what weird research niche would all such AI schools converge to after enough time.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#34

Post by wavewrangler » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

DarkUranium wrote: post #6

I feel like this should be treated as, and have consequences similar to, plagiarism. Alas, it's probably just wishful thinking on my part.

I thought that it was. I thought journals were starting to implement full bans upwards of a year+ for those who don't honestly disclose AI usage in their work? If I'm not mistaken, arXiv is doing this as well? granted, disclosure is different from overuse, but it seems like a small jump to just go ahead and just ban not checking ones work! ...disclosed or not disclosed. my own personal view on it, is if you can't be bothered to spot hallucinations and other such errors, its not ai that is the issue, it is incompetence and laziness

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#35

Post by flir » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

5555watch wrote: post #33

strictnein wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just need journals run by an AI that charges other AI to read them, and then the AI run colleges can promote the AI with the most AI journal entries and citations.

I wonder into what weird research niche would all such AI schools converge to after enough time.

Paperclip research.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#36

Post by blackqueeriroh » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:48 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #29

boplicity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> draconian social scoring This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How? In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometim…

"Consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" isn't necessarily draconian social scoring. Without a structure for imposing consequences on wrongdoers, we're not a society, we're just monkeys flinging poo at each other.

The problem is that everyone imagines some sort of just and fair arbiter of these things, when the reality is all of the social scoring and consequences and reputations rarely actually stem from one’s actions, and far more often stem from how much money someone has put in someone’s pocket, who someone knows, the color of someone’s skin, or what’s between someone’s legs.

Until we’re actually serious about treating people equitably, (not equally, as that would simply leave the lopsided power structure we have in place) we aren’t getting out of this.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#37

Post by csallen » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:50 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #29

boplicity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> draconian social scoring This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How? In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometim…

"Consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" isn't necessarily draconian social scoring. Without a structure for imposing consequences on wrongdoers, we're not a society, we're just monkeys flinging poo at each other.

People react negatively to this, because they fear a dystopian society of the sort we've seen in plenty of movies, and rightfully so.

But it's also worth pointing out that "consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" is already the world we live in and always have lived in. Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like. There's no such thing as a society with zero consequences and zero reputations. The only real question is a matter of degree, structure, severity, reach, and various idiosyncrasies that differ across cultures.

So it would be nice to have a more nuanced discussion about this instead of treating it like a 0 or 1 decision.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#38

Post by volumes94 » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:53 AM UTC

xiaoyu2006 wrote: post #26

jsw97 wrote: post #13

"A lot of the content of this blog was initially drafted by an agent of some sort" What? I mean who does this. My voice is my voice and it's literally never occurred to me to have an LLM do a first draft. I thought that was college kid stuff.

I can accept having a human first draft and let LLM proofreading and/or do some polish on language, but not the reversed order.

This is an oversimplification and I'll edit. Caleb and I had a conversation about our reviewing woes and thought it would be fun to do an interview style post, so we had Claude come up with some questions based on our convo. We answered the questions from scratch and had Claude proofread at the end.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#39

Post by dwattttt » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #29

boplicity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> draconian social scoring This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How? In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometim…

"Consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" isn't necessarily draconian social scoring. Without a structure for imposing consequences on wrongdoers, we're not a society, we're just monkeys flinging poo at each other.

For a more mathematically rigorous treatment, negative feedback is fundamental to Control Theory; it allows us to stabilise processes that would otherwise go out of control.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#40

Post by podocarp » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:16 AM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #5

This is a side effect of academia never taking open accessibility to papers and journals seriously. If all these papers were not gatekept by journals, it would be trivially easy to validate at least the existence of cited papers and quotes.

I don't think it's academia not taking it seriously, more like these publishers are just coasting on brand name and trying to milk every cent out of it. Peer review is essentially being a Reddit mod or something, you get nothing out of it but karma or a sticker, and the platform/publisher gets all the benefit.

Imagine being an author and paying to publish your novel. Also btw the editor is another author but has to proofread your book for free.

Many academics will publish preprints or their more popular papers on their own websites etc. It's just common sense because to academics they don't get paid a single cent by the publisher (and instead have to pay the publishers instead) and more publicity for them is always better than less.