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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

#341

Post by venturecruelty »

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.

"It's not a fentanyl problem, it's a people problem."

"It's not a car infrastructure problem, it's a people problem."

"It's not a food safety problem, it's a people problem."

"It's not a lead paint problem, it's a people problem."

"It's not an asbestos problem, it's a people problem."

"It's not a smoking problem, it's a people problem."

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#342

Post by venturecruelty »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #206
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.

maybe the hammer factory should be held responsible for pumping out so many poorly calibrated hammer

No, because this would cost tens of jobs and affect someone's profits, which are sacrosanct. Obviously the market wants exploding hammers, or else people wouldn't buy them. I am very smart.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#343

Post by RossBencina »

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.

No qualified carpenter expects to use a hammer to drill a hole.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#344

Post by jameshart »

nkrisc wrote: post #321
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…

Under what circumstances would a human mistakenly cite a paper which does not exist? I’m having difficulty imagining how someone could mistakenly do that.

The issue here is that many of the ‘hallucinations’ this article cites aren’t ’papers which do not exist’. They are incorrect author attributions, publication dates, or titles.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#345

Post by potato3732842 »

ulrashida wrote: post #102

Unfortunately while catching false citations is useful, in my experience that's not usually the problem affecting paper quality. Far more prevalent are authors who mis-cite materials, either drawing support from citations that don't actually say those things or strip the nuance away by using cherry picked quotes simply because that is what Google Scholar suggested as a top result. The time it takes to find these erro…

>These bad actors should be subject to a three strikes rule: the steady corrosion of knowledge is not an accident by these individuals.

These people are working in labs funded by Exxon or Meta or Pfizer or whoever and they know what results will make continued funding worthwhile in the eyes of their donors. If the lab doesn't produce the donor will fund another one that will.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#346

Post by venturecruelty »

chistev wrote: post #217

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 refer…

Talk about a buried lead... Avi Loeb is, first and foremost, a discredited crank.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#347

Post by venturecruelty »

skobes wrote: post #97
dclowd9901 wrote: post #28

To me, this is exactly what LLMs are good for. It would be exhausting double checking for valid citations in a research paper. Fuzzy comparison and rote lookup seem primed for usage with LLMs. Writing academic papers is exactly the _wrong_ usage for LLMs. So here we have a clear cut case for their usage and a clear cut case for their avoidance.

If LLMs produce fake citations, why would we trust LLMs to check them?

Because my boss said if I don't, I'm fired.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#348

Post by knome »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #220
KHRZ wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I assumed they meant using the LLM to extract the citations and then use external tooling to lookup and grab the original paper, at least verifying that it exists, has relevant title, summary and that the authors are correctly cited.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#349

Post by tedd4u »

calmworm wrote: post #283
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 don’t understand. You’re saying even with crappy tools one should be able to do the job the same as with well made tools?

Three and a half years ago nobody had ever used tools like this. It can't be a legitimate complaint for an author to say, "not my fault my citations are fake it's the fault of these tools" because until recently no such tools were available and the expectation was that all citations are real.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#350

Post by [deleted] »

ulrashida wrote: post #102

Unfortunately while catching false citations is useful, in my experience that's not usually the problem affecting paper quality. Far more prevalent are authors who mis-cite materials, either drawing support from citations that don't actually say those things or strip the nuance away by using cherry picked quotes simply because that is what Google Scholar suggested as a top result. The time it takes to find these erro…

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