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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

#281

Post by amitav1 »

ctoth wrote: post #260
nativeit wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I guess the way one would verify that this is more general trend in academia would be to run this on accepted papers to a non-AI conference?

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

#282

Post by Shocka1 »

neom wrote: post #141

I wrote before about my embarrassing time with ChatGPT during a period ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767601 ) - I decided to go back through those old 4o chats with 5.2 pro extended thinking, the reply was pretty funny because it first slightly ridiculed me, heh - but what it showed was: basically I would say "what 5 research papers from any area of science talk to these ideas" and it would find 1 and inve…

Just to clarify, you didn't actually look up the publications it was citing? For example, you just stayed in ChatGPT web and used the resources it provided there? Not ridiculing you of course, but am just curious. The last paper I wrote a couple months back I had GPT search out the publications for me, but I would always open a new tab and retrieve the actual publication.

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

#283

Post by jklinger410 »

paulmist wrote: post #201
jklinger410 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your entire job is confirming that science is valid, I expect a little more humility when it turns out you've missed a critical aspect. How did these 100 sources even get through the validation process? > Isn't disqualifying X months of potentially great research due to a misformed, but existing reference harsh? It will serve as a reminder not to cut any corners.

> When your entire job is confirming that science is valid, I expect a little more humility when it turns out you've missed a critical aspect. I wouldn't call a misformed reference a critical issue, it happens. That's why we have peer reviews. I would contend drawing superficially valid conclusions from studies through use of AI is a much more burning problem that speaks more to the integrity of the author. > It will…

> I wouldn't call a misformed reference a critical issue, it happens. That's why we have peer reviews.

Crazy to say this in a discussion where peer review missed hallucinated citations

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

#284

Post by DSMan195276 »

soiltype wrote: post #252
goalieca wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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?

Researchers apply for grants to fund their research, the university is generally not paying for it and instead they receive a cut of the grant money if it is awarded (IE. The grant covers the costs to the university for providing the facilities to do the research). If a researcher could get funding to reproduce a result then they could absolutely do it, but that's not what funds are usually being handed out for.

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

#285

Post by daveFNbuck »

worik wrote: post #272
m-schuetz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Bibtex are often also incorrectly generated ...and including the erroneous entry is squarely the author's fault. Papers should be carefully crafted, not churned out. I guess that makes me sweetly naive

You want the content of the paper to be carefully crafted. Bibtex entries are the sort of thing you want people to copy and paste from a trusted source, as they can be difficult to do consistently correctly.

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

#286

Post by neom »

Shocka1 wrote: post #282
neom wrote: post #141

I wrote before about my embarrassing time with ChatGPT during a period ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767601 ) - I decided to go back through those old 4o chats with 5.2 pro extended thinking, the reply was pretty funny because it first slightly ridiculed me, heh - but what it showed was: basically I would say "what 5 research papers from any area of science talk to these ideas" and it would find 1 and inve…

Just to clarify, you didn't actually look up the publications it was citing? For example, you just stayed in ChatGPT web and used the resources it provided there? Not ridiculing you of course, but am just curious. The last paper I wrote a couple months back I had GPT search out the publications for me, but I would always open a new tab and retrieve the actual publication.

I didn't because I wasn't really doing anything serious to my mind, I think? basically felt like watching an episode of pbs spacetime, I think the difference is it's more like playing a video game while thinking you're watching an episode of spacetime, if that makes sense? I don't use chatgpt for me real work that much, and I'm not a scientist, so it was for me just mucking around, it pushed me slightly over a line into "I was just playing but now this seems real", it didn't occur to me to go back through and check all the papers, I guess because quite a lot of chatting had happened since then and, I dunno, I just didn't think to? Not sure that makes much sense. This was also over a year ago, during the time they had the gpt4o sycophancy mode that made the news, and it wasn't backed by webserch, so I took for granted what was in it's training data. No good excuse I'm afraid. tldr: poor critical thinking skills on my part there! :)

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

#289

Post by tuckerman »

worik wrote: post #272
m-schuetz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Bibtex are often also incorrectly generated ...and including the erroneous entry is squarely the author's fault. Papers should be carefully crafted, not churned out. I guess that makes me sweetly naive

I don't think the original comment was saying this isn't a problem but that flagging it as a hallucination from an LLM is a much more serious allegation. In this case, it also seems like it was done to market a paid product which makes the collateral damage less tolerable in my opinion.

> Papers should be carefully crafted, not churned out.

I think you can say the same thing for code and yet, even with code review, bugs slip by. People aren't perfect and problems happen. Trying to prevent 100% of problems is usually a bad cost/benefit trade-off.

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

#290

Post by m-schuetz »

worik wrote: post #272
m-schuetz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Bibtex are often also incorrectly generated ...and including the erroneous entry is squarely the author's fault. Papers should be carefully crafted, not churned out. I guess that makes me sweetly naive

That's not happening for a similar reason people do not bug-check every single line of every single third-party library in their code. It's a chore that costs valuable time that you can instead spend on getting the actual stuff done. What's really important is that the scientific contribution is 100% correct and solid. For the references, the "good enough" paradigm applies. They mustn't be complete bogus, like the referenced work not existing at all which would indicate that the authors didnt even look at the reference. But minor issues like typos or rare issues with wrong authors can happen.
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