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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

#251

Post by biophysboy »

mike_hearn wrote: post #207
biophysboy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? More samples reduces the variance of a statistic. Obviously it cannot identify systematic bias in a model, or establish causality, or make a "bad" question "good". Its not overrated though -- it would strengthen or weaken the case for many papers.

If you have a strong grip on exactly what it means, sure, but look at any HN thread on the topic of fraud in science. People think replication = validity because it's been described as the replication crisis for the last 15 years. And that's the best case! Funding replication studies in the current environment would just lead to lots of invalid papers being promoted as "fully replicated" and people would be fooled ev…

> look at any HN thread on the topic of fraud in science.

HN is very tedious/lazy when it comes to science criticism -- very much agree with you on this.

My only point is replication is necessary to establish validity, even if it is not sufficient. Whether it gives a scientist a false sense of security doesn't change the math of sampling.

I also agree with you on quality issues. I think alternative investment strategies (other than project grants) would be a useful step for reducing perverse incentives, for example. But there's a lot of things science could do.

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

#252

Post by soiltype »

goalieca wrote: post #202
parpfish wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

But that seems almost trivially solved. In software it's common to value independent verification - e.g. code review. Someone who is only focused on writing new code instead of careful testing, refactoring, or peer review is widely viewed as a shitty developer by their peers. Of course there's management to consider and that's where incentives are skewed, but we're talking about a different structure. Why wouldn't the following work?

A single university or even department could make this change - reproduction is the important work, reproduction is what earns a PhD. Or require some split, 20-50% novel work maybe is also expected. Now the incentives are changed. Potentially, this university develops a reputation for reliable research. Others may follow suit.

Presumably, there's a step in this process where money incentivizes the opposite of my suggestion, and I'm not familiar with the process to know which.

Is it the university itself which will be starved of resources if it's not pumping out novel (yet unreproducible) research?

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

#254

Post by davidguetta »

j2kun wrote: post #238

I spot-checked one of the flagged papers (from Google, co-authored by a colleague of mine) The paper was https://openreview.net/forum?id=0ZnXGzLcOg and the problem flagged was "Two authors are omitted and one (Kyle Richardson) is added. This paper was published at ICLR 2024." I.e., for one cited paper, the author list was off and the venue was wrong. And this citation was mentioned in the background section of the pa…

Yeah even the entire "Jane Doe / Jame Smith" my first thought is that it could have been a latex default value

There was dumb stuff like this before the GPT era, it's far from convincing

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

#255

Post by soiltype »

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…

That feels arbitrary as a measure of quality. Why isn't new research simply devalued and replication valued higher?

"Dr Alice failed to reproduce 20 would-be headline-grabbing papers, preventing them from sucking all the air out of the room in cancer research" is something laudable, but we're not lauding it.

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

#256

Post by nativeit »

j2kun wrote: post #238

I spot-checked one of the flagged papers (from Google, co-authored by a colleague of mine) The paper was https://openreview.net/forum?id=0ZnXGzLcOg and the problem flagged was "Two authors are omitted and one (Kyle Richardson) is added. This paper was published at ICLR 2024." I.e., for one cited paper, the author list was off and the venue was wrong. And this citation was mentioned in the background section of the pa…

I see your point, but I don’t see where the author makes any claims about the specifics of the hallucinations, or their impact on the papers’ broader validity. Indeed, I would have found the removal of supposed “innocuous” examples to be far more deceptive than simply calling a spade a spade, and allowing the data to speak for itself.

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

#257

Post by nativeit »

davidguetta wrote: post #254
j2kun wrote: post #238

I spot-checked one of the flagged papers (from Google, co-authored by a colleague of mine) The paper was https://openreview.net/forum?id=0ZnXGzLcOg and the problem flagged was "Two authors are omitted and one (Kyle Richardson) is added. This paper was published at ICLR 2024." I.e., for one cited paper, the author list was off and the venue was wrong. And this citation was mentioned in the background section of the pa…

Yeah even the entire "Jane Doe / Jame Smith" my first thought is that it could have been a latex default value There was dumb stuff like this before the GPT era, it's far from convincing

> Between 2020 and 2025, submissions to NeurIPS increased more than 220% from 9,467 to 21,575. In response, organizers have had to recruit ever greater numbers of reviewers, resulting in issues of oversight, expertise alignment, negligence, and even fraud.

I don’t think the point being made is “errors didn’t happen pre-GPT”, rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.

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

#258

Post by ls612 »

davidguetta wrote: post #254
j2kun wrote: post #238

I spot-checked one of the flagged papers (from Google, co-authored by a colleague of mine) The paper was https://openreview.net/forum?id=0ZnXGzLcOg and the problem flagged was "Two authors are omitted and one (Kyle Richardson) is added. This paper was published at ICLR 2024." I.e., for one cited paper, the author list was off and the venue was wrong. And this citation was mentioned in the background section of the pa…

Yeah even the entire "Jane Doe / Jame Smith" my first thought is that it could have been a latex default value There was dumb stuff like this before the GPT era, it's far from convincing

There are people who just want to punish academics for the sake of punishing academics. Look at all the people downthread salivating over blacklisting or even criminally charging people who make errors like this with felony fraud. Its the perfect brew of anti AI and anti academia sentiment.

Also, in my field (economics), by far the biggest source of finding old papers invalid (or less valid, most papers state multiple results) is good old fashioned coding bugs. I'd like to see the software engineers on this site say with a straight face that writing bugs should lead to jail time.

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

#259

Post by m-schuetz »

j2kun wrote: post #238

I spot-checked one of the flagged papers (from Google, co-authored by a colleague of mine) The paper was https://openreview.net/forum?id=0ZnXGzLcOg and the problem flagged was "Two authors are omitted and one (Kyle Richardson) is added. This paper was published at ICLR 2024." I.e., for one cited paper, the author list was off and the venue was wrong. And this citation was mentioned in the background section of the pa…

Bibtex are often also incorrectly generated. E.g., google scholar sometimes puts the names of the editors instead of the authors into the bibtex entry.

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

#260

Post by ctoth »

nativeit wrote: post #257
davidguetta wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah even the entire "Jane Doe / Jame Smith" my first thought is that it could have been a latex default value There was dumb stuff like this before the GPT era, it's far from convincing

> Between 2020 and 2025, submissions to NeurIPS increased more than 220% from 9,467 to 21,575. In response, organizers have had to recruit ever greater numbers of reviewers, resulting in issues of oversight, expertise alignment, negligence, and even fraud. I don’t think the point being made is “errors didn’t happen pre-GPT”, rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associ…

> rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.

Did the increase to submissions to NeurIPS from 2020 to 2025 happen because ChatGPT came out in November of 2022? Or was AI getting hotter and hotter during this period, thereby naturally increasing submissions to ... an AI conference?

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