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Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

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Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#211

Post by peppersghost93 »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #177
peppersghost93 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a prime example of what I'm talking about. AI's produce trash and it's everyone else's problem to deal with.

Yes, it's the scientists problem to deal with it - that's the choice they made when they decided to use AI for their work. Again, this is what responsibility means.

This inspires me to make horrible products and shift the blame to the end user for the product being horrible in the first place. I can't take any blame for anything because I didn't force them to use it.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#212

Post by hnfong »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #72
zwnow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a good paper if the info in it cant be trusted lmao

Whether the information in the paper can be trusted is an entirely separate concern. Old Chinese mathematics texts are difficult to date because they often purport to be older than they are. But the contents are unaffected by this. There is a history-of-math problem, but there's no math problem.

You are totally correct that hallucinated citations do not invalidate the paper. The paper sans citations might be great too (I mean the LLM could generate great stuff, it's possible).

But the author(s) of the paper is almost by definition a bad scientist (or whatever field they are in). When a researcher writes a paper for publication, if they're not expected to write the thing themselves, at least they should be responsible for checking the accuracy of the contents, and citations are part of the paper...

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#213

Post by amanaplanacanal »

auggierose wrote: post #60
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…

In short, a review has no objective value, it is just an obstacle to be gamed.

In theory, the review tries to determine if the conclusion reached actually follows from whatever data is provided. It assumes that everything is honest, it's just looking to see if there were mistakes made.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#214

Post by SauntSolaire »

thfuran wrote: post #188
SauntSolaire wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I merely said that the scientist is the one responsible for the quality of their own work. Any critiques you may have for the tools which they use don't lessen this responsibility.

>No, I merely said that the scientist is the one responsible for the quality of their own work. No, you expressed unqualified agreement with a comment containing “And yet, we’re not supposed to criticize the tool or its makers?” >Any critiques you may have for the tools which they use don't lessen this responsibility. People don’t exist or act in a vacuum. That a scientist is responsible for the quality of their work…

You can criticize the tool or its makers, but not as a means to lessen the responsibility of the professional using it (the rest of the quoted comment). I agree with the GP, it's not a valid excuse for the scientist's poor quality of work.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#215

Post by SubiculumCode »

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 seriously. Using an LLM to help find papers is fine. Then you read them. Then you use a tool like Zotero or manually add citations. I use Gemini Pro to identify useful papers that I might not yet have encountered before. But, even when asking to restrict itself to Pubmed resources, it's citations are wonky, citing three different version sources of the same paper (citations that don't say what they said they'd discuss).

That said, these tools have substantially reduced hallucinations over the last year, and will just get better. It also helps if you can restrict it to reference already screened papers.

Finally, I'd lke to say tthat if we want scientists to engage in good science, stop forcing them to spend a third of their time in a rat race for funding...it is ridiculously time consuming and wasteful of expertise.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#216

Post by rdiddly »

So papers and citations are created with AI, and here they're being reviewed with AI. When they're published they'll be read by AI, and used to write more papers with AI. Pretty soon, humans won't need to be involved at all, in this apparently insufferable and dreary business we call science, that nobody wants to actually do.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#217

Post by chistev »

Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their references and took the AI's output as gospel.

https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#218

Post by thfuran »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #214
thfuran wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, I merely said that the scientist is the one responsible for the quality of their own work. No, you expressed unqualified agreement with a comment containing “And yet, we’re not supposed to criticize the tool or its makers?” >Any critiques you may have for the tools which they use don't lessen this responsibility. People don’t exist or act in a vacuum. That a scientist is responsible for the quality of their work…

You can criticize the tool or its makers, but not as a means to lessen the responsibility of the professional using it (the rest of the quoted comment). I agree with the GP, it's not a valid excuse for the scientist's poor quality of work.

I just substantially edited the comment you replied to.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#219

Post by Forgeties79 »

imiric wrote: post #93
Forgeties79 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my calculator gives me the wrong number 20% of the time yeah I should’ve identified the problem, but ideally, that wouldn’t have been sold to me as a functioning calculator in the first place.

Indeed. The narrative that this type of issue is entirely the responsibility of the user to fix is insulting, and blame deflection 101. It's not like these are new issues. They're the same ones we've experienced since the introduction of these tools. And yet the focus has always been to throw more data and compute at the problem, and optimize for fancy benchmarks, instead of addressing these fundamental problems. Wor…

> Worse still, whenever they're brought up users are blamed for "holding it wrong", or for misunderstanding how the tools work. I don't care. An "artificial intelligence" shouldn't be plagued by these issues.

My feelings exactly, but you’re articulating it better than I typically do ha

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#220

Post by bossyTeacher »

KHRZ wrote: post #196
tialaramex wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether in the 1970s or now, it's too often the case that a paper says "Foo and Bar are X" and cites two sources for this fact. You chase down the sources, the first one says "We weren't able to determine whether Foo is X" and never mentions Bar. The second says "Assuming Bar is X, we show that Foo is probably X too". The paper author likely believes Foo and Bar are X, it may well be that all their co-workers, if ask…

LLMs can actually make up for their negative contributions. They could go through all the references of all papers and verify them, assuming someone would also look into what gets flagged for that final seal of disapproval. But this would be more powerfull with an open knowledge base where all papers and citation verifications were registered, so that all the effort put into verification could be reused, and errors p…

>LLMs can actually make up for their negative contributions. They could go through all the references of all papers and verify them,

They will just hallucinate their existence. I have tried this before

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