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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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

Yeah in principle funded PhD positions are quite competitive and as I understand it you tend to be interviewed and essentially ranked against other candidates. But I guess if you're paying for yourself to be there you'll face lower scrutiny

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

#472
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…

"If much of your research paper can be written by AI, I call into question whether or not it represents actual research" And what happens to this statement if next year or later this year the papers that can be autonomously written passes median human paper mark?

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

#473
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…

As with anything, it is about trusting your tools. Who is culpable for such errors? In the days of human authors, the person writing the text is responsible for not making these errors. When AI does the writing, the person whose name is on the paper should still be responsible—but do they know that? Do they realize the responsibility they are shouldering when they use these AI tools? I think many times they do not; we implicitly trust the outputs of these tools, and the dangers of that are not made clear.

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

#474
I'm surprised by these results. I would have expected non-Anglo-American universities to rank at the top of the list. One of the most valuable features of LLMs from the beginning has been their ability to improve written language. This is particularly beneficial for non-English-speaking researchers in preventing language-related biases. However, the list shows that LLM usage is more intensive in the English-speaking world. Why?

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

#475
post #379
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If these are the only errors, we are not troubled. However: we do not know if these are the only errors, they are merely a signature that the paper was submitted without being thoroughly checked for hallucinations. They are a signature that some LLM was used to generate parts of the paper and the responsible authors used this LLM without care. I am troubled by people using an LLM at all to write academic research p…

I would argue that an LLM is a perfectly sensible tool for structure-preserving machine translation from another language to English. (Where by "another language", you could also also substitute "very poor/non-fluent English." Though IMHO that's a bit silly, even though it's possible; there's little sense in writing in a language you only half know, when you'd get a less-lossy result from just writing in your native…

I'm surprised by these results. I agree that LLMs are a great tool for offsetting the English-speaking world's advantage. I would have expected non-Anglo-American universities to rank at the top of the list. One of the most valuable features of LLMs from the beginning has been their ability to improve written language.

Why is their use more intense in English-speaking universities?

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

#476
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that an LLM is a perfectly sensible tool for structure-preserving machine translation from another language to English. (Where by "another language", you could also also substitute "very poor/non-fluent English." Though IMHO that's a bit silly, even though it's possible; there's little sense in writing in a language you only half know, when you'd get a less-lossy result from just writing in your native…

Autotranslating technical texts is very hard. After the translation, you muct check that all the technical words were translated correctly, instead of a fancy synonym that does not make sense. (A friend has an old book translated a long time ago (by a human) from Russian to Spanish. Instead of " complex numbers ", the book calls them " complicated numbers ". :) )

When reading technical material in my native language, I sometimes need to translate it back to English to fully understand it.

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

#477
post #401
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If these are the only errors, we are not troubled. However: we do not know if these are the only errors, they are merely a signature that the paper was submitted without being thoroughly checked for hallucinations. They are a signature that some LLM was used to generate parts of the paper and the responsible authors used this LLM without care. I am troubled by people using an LLM at all to write academic research p…

>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…

Higher education is not free. People pay a shit ton of money to attend and also governments (taxpayers) invest a lot. Imagine offloading your research to an AI bot...

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

#478
post #379
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If these are the only errors, we are not troubled. However: we do not know if these are the only errors, they are merely a signature that the paper was submitted without being thoroughly checked for hallucinations. They are a signature that some LLM was used to generate parts of the paper and the responsible authors used this LLM without care. I am troubled by people using an LLM at all to write academic research p…

I would argue that an LLM is a perfectly sensible tool for structure-preserving machine translation from another language to English. (Where by "another language", you could also also substitute "very poor/non-fluent English." Though IMHO that's a bit silly, even though it's possible; there's little sense in writing in a language you only half know, when you'd get a less-lossy result from just writing in your native…

To that point I think it's lovely how LLMs democratize science. At ICLR a few years ago I spoke with a few Korean researchers that were delighted that their relative inability to write in English was no being held against them during the review process. I think until then I underestimated how pivotal this technology was in lowering the barrier to entry for the non-English speaking scientific community.

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

#479
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> TBF, most people in real life don't even know how AI works to any degree How about the authors who do research for NeurIPS? Do they know how AI works?

Who knows? Do NeurIPS have a pedigree of original, well sourced research dating back to before the advent of LLMs? We're at the point where both of the terms "AI" and "Experts" are so blurred it's almost impossible to trust or distrust anything without spending more time on due diligence than most subjects deserve.

As the wise woman once said "Ain't nobody got time for that".

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

#480
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…

> relatively harmless and minor errors

They are not harmless. These hallucinated references are ingested by Google Scholar, Scopus, etc., and with enough time they will poison those wells. It is also plain academic malpractice, no matter how "minor" the reference is.

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