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Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

gptzero.me

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Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#151

Post by grayhatter »

pron wrote: post #115
grayhatter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That is not, cannot be, and shouldn't be, the bar for peer review. There are two major differences between it and code review: 1. A patch is self-contained and applies to a codebase you have just as much access to as the author. A paper, on the other hand, is just the tip of the iceberg of research work, especially if there is some experiment or data collection involved. The reviewer does not have access to, say, vid…

> That is not, cannot be, and shouldn't be, the bar for peer review.

Given the repeatability crisis I keep reading about, maybe something should change?

> 2. The software is also self-contained. That's "prodcution". But a scientific paper does not necessarily aim to represent scientific consensus, but a finding by a particular team of researchers. If a paper's conclusions are wrong, it's expected that it will be refuted by another paper.

This is a much, MUCH stronger point. I would have lead with this because the contrast between this assertion, and my comparison to prod is night and day. The rules for prod are different from the rules of scientific consensus. I regret losing sight of that.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#152

Post by bluGill »

zdragnar wrote: post #59
agentultra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough? The problem with this analogy is that it makes no sense. LLMs aren’t guns. The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy. And that gets tiresome because the whole point is that the LLM saves you time and effort doing it yourself. So naturally people will tend to…

> If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough? Absolutely. Many guns don't have safties. You don't load a round in the chamber unless you intend on using it. A gun going off when you don't intend is a negligent discharge. No ifs, ands or buts. The person in possession of the gun is always responsible for it.

> A gun going off when you don't intend is a negligent discharg

false. A gun goes off when not intended too often to claim that. It has happned to me - I then took the gun to a qualified gunsmith for repairs.

A gun they fires and hits anything you didn't intend to is negligent discharge even if you intended to shoot. Gun saftey is about assuming a gun that could possible fire will and ensuring nothing bad can happen. When looking at gun in a store (that you might want to buy) you aim it at an upper corner where even if it fires the odds of something bad resulting is the least lively to happen (it should be unloaded - and you may have checked, but you still aim there!)

same with cat toy lazers - they should be safe to shine in an eye - but you still point in a safe direction.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#153

Post by SauntSolaire »

peppersghost93 wrote: post #128
SauntSolaire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's what it means to be a professional, you take responsibility for the quality of your work.

It's a shame the slop generators don't ever have to take responsibility for the trash they've produced.

That's beside the point. While there may be many reasonable critiques of AI, none of them reduce the responsibilities of scientist.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#154

Post by agentultra »

oceansweep wrote: post #57
agentultra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough? The problem with this analogy is that it makes no sense. LLMs aren’t guns. The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy. And that gets tiresome because the whole point is that the LLM saves you time and effort doing it yourself. So naturally people will tend to…

Yes. That is absolutely the case. One of the Most popular handguns does not have a safety switch that must be toggled before firing. (Glock series handguns) If someone performs a negligent discharge, they are responsible, not Glock. It does have other safety mechanisms to prevent accidental fires not resulting from a trigger pull.

You seem to be getting hung up on the details of guns and missing the point that it’s a bad analogy.

Another way LLMs are not guns: you don’t need a giant data centre owned by a mega corp to use your gun.

Can’t do science because GlockGPT is down? Too bad I guess. Let’s go watch the paint dry.

The reason I made it is because this is inherently how we designed LLMs. They will make bad citations and people need to be careful.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#155

Post by ineedasername »

stdbrouw wrote: post #101
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 idea that references in a scientific paper should be plentiful but aren't really that important, is a consequence of a previous technological revolution: the internet. You'll find a lot of papers from, say, the '70s, with a grand total of maybe 10 references, all of them to crucial prior work, and if those references don't say what the author claims they should say (e.g. that the particular method that is employe…

>“consequence of a previous technological revolution: the internet.”

And also of increasingly ridiculous and overly broad concepts of what plagiarism is. At some point things shifted from “don’t represent others’ work as novel” towards “give a genealogical ontology of every concept above that of an intro 101 college course on the topic.”

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#156

Post by theoldgreybeard »

rectang wrote: post #135
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.

“X isn’t the problem, people are the problem.” — the age-old cry of industry resisting regulation.

I am not against regulation.

Quite the opposite actually.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#157

Post by jodleif »

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.

I find this to be a bit “easy”. There is such a thing as bad tools. If it is difficult to determine if the tool is good or bad i’d say some of the blame has to be put on the tool.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#158

Post by photochemsyn »

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.

Yeah, I can't imagine not being familiar with every single reference in the bibliography of a technical publication with one's name on it. It's almost as bad as those PIs who rely on lab techs and postdocs to generate research data using equipment that they don't understand the workings of - but then, I've seen that kind of thing repeatedly in research academia, along with actual fabrication of data in the name of getting another paper out the door, another PhD granted, etc.

Unfortunately, a large fraction of academic fraud has historically been detected by sloppy data duplication, and with LLMs and similar image generation tools, data fabrication has never been easier to do or harder to detect.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#159

Post by crazygringo »

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.

They're a very specific kind of error, just like off-by-one errors, or I/O errors, or network errors. The name for this kind of error is a hallucination.

We need a word for this specific kind of error, and we have one, so we use it. Being less specific about a type of error isn't helping anyone. Whether it "anthropomorphizes", I couldn't care less. Heck, bugs come from actual insects. It's a word we've collectively started to use and it works.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#160

Post by mapmeld »

pmontra wrote: post #61
llm_nerd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will commonly hold LLMs as unusable because they make mistakes. So do people. Books have errors. Papers have errors. People have flawed knowledge, often degraded through a conceptual game of telephone. Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty. People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of th…

Fabricated citations are not errors. A pre LLM paper with fabricated citations would demonstrate will to cheat by the author. A post LLM paper with fabricated citations: same thing and if the authors attempt to defend themselves with something like, we trusted the AI, they are sloppy, probably cheaters and not very good at it.

Further, if I use AI-written citations to back some claim or fact, what are the actual claims or facts based on? These started happening in law because someone writes the text and then wishes there was a source that was relevant and actually supportive of their claim. But if someone puts in the labor to check your real/extant sources, there's nothing backing it (e.g. MAHA report).
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