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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

#451

Post by michaelt »

BobbyJo wrote: post #433
aydyn wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>also plagiarism To me, this is a reminder of how much of a specific minority this forum is. Nobody I know in real life, personally or at work, has expressed this belief. I have literally only ever encountered this anti-AI extremism (extremism in the non-pejorative sense) in places like reddit and here. Clearly, the authors in NeurIPS don't agree that using an LLM to help write is "plagiarism", and I would trust thei…

> Nobody I know in real life, personally or at work, has expressed this belief. TBF, most people in real life don't even know how AI works to any degree, so using that as an argument that parent's opinion is extreme is kind of circular reasoning. > I have literally only ever encountered this anti-AI extremism (extremism in the non-pejorative sense) in places like reddit and here. I don't see parent's opinions as anti…

> Research is supposed to be new ideas. If much of your research paper can be written by AI, I call into question whether or not it represents actual research.

One would hope the authors are forming a hypothesis, performing an experiment, gathering and analysing results, and only then passing it to the AI to convert it into a paper.

If I have a theory that, IDK, laser welds in a sine wave pattern are stronger than laser welds in a zigzag pattern - I've still got to design the exact experimental details, obtain all the equipment and consumables, cut a few dozen test coupons, weld them, strength test them, and record all the measurements.

Obviously if I skipped the experimentation and just had an AI fabricate the results table, that's academic misconduct of the clearest form.

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

#452

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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…

The example you provided doesn't sit right me.

If the mistake is one error of author and location in a citation, I find it fairly disingenuous to call that an hallucination. At least, it doesn't meet the threshold for me.

I have seen this kind of mistakes done long before LLM were even a thing. We used to call them that: mistakes.

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

#453

Post by mike_hearn »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #416
mike_hearn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Part of replication is skeptical review. That's also part of the scientific method. If we're not doing thorough review and replication, we're not really doing science. It's a lot of faith in people incentivized to do sloppy or dishonest work. Edit: I just read your article linked upthread. It was really good. I don't think we disagree except I say we need to attempt the steps of science wherever sensible and there's…

Yes, that's true. In theory, by the time it gets to the replication stage a paper has already been reviewed. In practice a replication is often the first time a paper is examined adversarially. There might be a useful form of hybrid here, like paying professional skeptics to review papers. The peer review concept academia works on is a very naive setup of the sort you'd expect given the prevailing ideology ("from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"). Paying professionals to do it would be a good start, but only if there are consequences to a failed review, which there just aren't today.

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

#454

Post by [deleted] »

NightBlossom wrote: post #407

This feels less like scientific integrity and more like predatory marketing. I find this public "shame list" approach by GPTZero deeply unethical and technically suspect for several reasons: 1. Doxxing disguised as specific criticism: Publishing the names of authors and papers without prior private notification or independent verification is not how academic corrections work. It looks like a marketing stunt to genera…

[deleted]

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

#455

Post by zipy124 »

cflewis wrote: post #175
captainbland wrote: post #162

What's wild is so many of these are from prestigious universities. MIT, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge are all on there. It must be a terrible time to be an academic who's getting outcompeted by this slop because somebody from an institution with a better name submitted it.

I'm going to be charitable and say that the papers from prestigious universities were honest mistakes rather than paper mill university fabrications. One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is that computer science (and I assume other scientific fields) has long since decided that English is the lingua franca, and if you don't speak it you can't be part of it. Can you imagine if being told that you could…

I can't speak for the American universities, but remember there is no entrance exam for UK PhDs, you just require a 2:1 or 1st class bachelor's degree/masters (going straight without a masters is becoming more common) usually, which is trivial to obtain. The hard part is usually getting funding, but if you provide your own funding you can go to any university you want. They are only really hard universities to get into for a bachelors, not for masters or PhD where you are more of a money/labour source than anything else.

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

#456

Post by rurban »

I'd really like to have studied in these times, where it's so much easier with all the new tools. I could have been a triple doctor.

At work I've automated tools to write automated technical certificates for wind parks.

I've wrote code automatically to solve problems I couldn't solve by my own. Complicated Linear Algebra stuff, which was always too hard.

I should have written papers automatically, at least my wife writes her reports with ChatGPT already.

Others are writing film scripts by tools.

Good times.

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

#458

Post by simsla »

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

Pointing out these errors isn't wrong. But making the leap to "therefore: AI hallucinations!" without substantiating those accusations is.

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

#459

Post by mturmon »

bsder wrote: post #358
mturmon wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an area chair on the NeurIPS program committee in 1997. I just looked and it seems that we had 1280 submissions. At that time, we were ultimately capped by the book size that MIT Press was willing to put out - 150 8-page articles. Back in 1997 we were all pretty sure we were on to something big. I'm sure people made mistakes on their bibliographies at that time as well! And did we all really dig up and read Met…

> And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)? If you didn't, you are lying. Full stop. If you cite something, yes, I expect that you, at least, went back and read the original citation. The whole damn point of a citation is to provide a link for the reader. If you didn't find it worth the minimal amount of time to go read, then why would your reader? And why di…

I meant this more as a rueful acknowledgment of an academic truism - not all citations are read by those citing. But I have touched a nerve, so let me explain at least part of the nuance I see here.

In mathematics/applied math consider cited papers claimed to establish a certain result, but where that was not quite what was shown. Or, there is in effect no earthly way to verify that it does.

Or even: the community agrees it was shown there, but perhaps has lost intimate contact with the details — I’m thinking about things like Laplace’s CLT (published in French), or the original form of the Glivenko-Cantelli theorem (published in Italian). These citations happen a lot, and we should not pretend otherwise.

Here’s the example that crystallized that for me. “VC dimension” is a much-cited combinatorial concept/lemma. It’s typical for a very hard paper of Saharon Shelah (https://projecteuclid.org/journalArticle/Download?urlId=pjm%...) to be cited, along with an easier paper of Norbert Sauer. There are currently 800 citations of Shelah’s paper.

I read a monograph by noted mathematician David Pollard covering this work. Pollard, no stranger to doing the hard work, wrote (probably in an endnote) that Shelah’s paper was often cited, but he could not verify that it established the result at all. I was charmed by the candor.

This was the first acknowledgement I had seen that something was fishy with all those citations.

By this time, I had probably seen Shelah’s paper cited 50 times. Let’s just say that there is no way all 50 of those citing authors (now grown to 800) were working their way through a dense paper on transfinite cardinals to verify this had anything to do with VC dimension.

Of course, people were wanting to give credit. So their intentions were perhaps generous. But in no meaningful sense had they “read” this paper.

So I guess the short answer to your question is, citations serve more uses than telling readers to literally read the cited work, and by extension, should not always taken to mean that the cited work was indeed read.

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

#460

Post by jcmp »

smallpipe wrote: post #13

Could you run a similar analysis for pre-2020 papers? It'd be interesting to know how prevalent making up sources was before LLMs.

at the end of the article they made a clear distinction between flawed and hallucinated cititations. I feels its hard to argue that through a mistake a hallucinated citation emerge:

> Real Citation Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. Deep learning. nature, 521:436-444, 2015.

Flawed Citation

Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and Geoff Hinton. Deep leaning. nature, 521(7553):436-444, 2015.

Hallucinated Citation

Samuel LeCun Jackson. Deep learning. Science & Nature: 23-45, 2021.

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