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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

#101

Post by pixl97 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #88
StableAlkyne wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing chemical x which does y" you see "Researcher reproduces amazing results for chemical x which does y. First discovered by z". Most people (that I talk to, at least) in science agree that there's a reproducibility crisis. The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work. Fundamentally (unless you're independent weal…

> If you measure raw number of papers (more common in developing countries and low-tier universities), you incentivize a flood of junk. This is exactly what rewarding replication papers (that reproduce and confirm an existing paper) will lead to.

And yet if we can't reproduce an existing paper, it's very possible that existing paper is junk itself.

Catch-22 is a fun game to get caught in.

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

#102

Post by gcr »

pessimizer wrote: post #86
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about banning them, humans without LLMs make mistakes all the time, but I would definitely place them under much harder scrutiny in the future.

Hallucinations aren't mistakes, they're fabrications. The two are probably referred to by the same word in some languages. Institutions can choose an arbitrary approach to mistakes; maybe they don't mind a lot of them because they want to take risks and be on the bleeding edge. But any flexible attitude towards fabrications is simply corruption. The connected in-crowd will get mercy and the outgroup will get the hamm…

Fabrications carry intent to decieve. I don't think hallucinations necessarily do. If anything, they're a matter of negligence, not deception.

Think of it this way: if I wanted to commit pure academic fraud maliciously, I wouldn't make up a fake reference. Instead, I'd find an existing related paper and merely misrepresent it to support my own claims. That way, the deception is much harder to discover and I'd have plausible deniability -- "oh I just misunderstood what they were saying."

I think most academic fraud happens in the figures, not the citations. Researchers are more likely to to be successful at making up data points than making up references because it's impossible to know without the data files.

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

#103

Post by WarmWash »

Proziam wrote: post #80
WarmWash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil. EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.

It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.

Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.

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

#104

Post by WarmWash »

wat10000 wrote: post #92
WarmWash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We also have a criminal court system to handle stuff like this.

No we don't. I've never seen a private contract dispute go to criminal court, probably because it's a civil matter.

If they actually committed theft, well then that already is illegal too.

But right now, doing "shitty research" isn't illegal and it's unlikely it ever will be.

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

#106

Post by freedomben »

Proziam wrote: post #31
oofbey wrote: 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.

False equivalence. This isn't about "using AI" it's about having an AI pretend to do your job. What people are pissed about is the fact their tax dollars fund fake research. It's just fraud, pure and simple. And fraud should be punished brutally, especially in these cases, because the long tail of negative effects produces enormous damage.

I was originally thinking you were being way too harsh with your "punish criminally" take, but I must admit, you're winning me over. I think we would need to be careful to ensure we never (or realistically, very rarely) convict an innocent person, but this is in many cases outright theft/fraud when someone is making money or being "compensated" for producing work that is fraudulent.

For people who think this is too harsh, just remember we aren't talking about undergrads who cheat on a course paper here. We're talking about people who were given money (often from taxpayers) that committed fraud. This is textbook white collar crime, not some kid being lazy. At a minimum we should be taking all that money back from them and barring them from ever receiving grant money again. In some cases I think fines exceeding the money they received would be appropriate.

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

#107

Post by StableAlkyne »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #93
StableAlkyne wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing chemical x which does y" you see "Researcher reproduces amazing results for chemical x which does y. First discovered by z". Most people (that I talk to, at least) in science agree that there's a reproducibility crisis. The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work. Fundamentally (unless you're independent weal…

> The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work. What if we got Undergrads (with hope of graduate studies) to do it? Could be a great way to train them on the skills required for research without the pressure of it also being novel?

Those undergrads still need to be advised and they use lab resources.

If you're a tenure-track academic, your livelihood is much safer from having them try new ideas (that you will be the corresponding author on, increasing your prestige and ability to procure funding) instead of incrementing.

And if you already have tenure, maybe you have the undergrad do just that. But the tenure process heavily filters for ambitious researchers, so it's unlikely this would be a priority.

If instead you did it as coursework, you could get them to maybe reproduce the work, but if you only have the students for a semester, that's not enough time to write up the paper and make it through peer review (which can take months between iterations)

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

#108

Post by jimbokun »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #82
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…

> I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing chemical x which does y" you see "Researcher reproduces amazing results for chemical x which does y. First discovered by z". Most people (that I talk to, at least) in science agree that there's a reproducibility crisis. The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work. Fundamentally (unless you're independent weal…

> The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work.

Ban publication of any research that hasn't been reproduced.

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

#109

Post by doug_durham »

Getting papers published is now more about embellishing your CV versus a sincere desire to present new research. I see this everywhere at every level. Getting a paper published anywhere is a checkbox in completing your resume. As an industry we need to stop taking this into consideration when reviewing candidates or deciding pay. In some sense it has become an anti-signal.

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

#110

Post by nerdjon »

The downstream effects of this are extremely concerning. We have already seen the damage caused by human written research that was later retracted like the “research” on vaccines causing autism.

As we get more and more papers that may be citing information that was originally hallucinated in the first place we have a major reliability issue here. What is worse is people that did not use AI in the first place will be caught in the crosshairs since they will be referencing incorrect information.

There needs to be a serious amount of education done on what these tools can and cannot do and importantly where they fail. Too many people see these tools as magic since that is what the big companies are pushing them as.

Other than that we need to put in actual repercussions for publishing work created by an LLM without validating it (or just say you can’t in the first place but I guess that ship has sailed) or it will just keep happening. We can’t just ignore it and hope it won’t be a problem.

And yes, humans can make mistakes too. The difference is accountability and the ability to actually be unsure about something so you question yourself to validate.

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