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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

#521

Post by techpression »

cthalupa wrote: post #519
techpression wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that the whole point of publishing? This happened plenty before AI too, and the claims are easily verified by checking the claimed hallucinations. Don’t publish things that aren’t verified and you won’t have a problem, same as before but perhaps now it’s easier to verify, which is a good thing. We see this problem in many areas, last week it was a criminal case where a made up law was referenced, luckily the ju…

> Isn’t that the whole point of publishing? No, obviously not. You're confusing a marketing post by people with a product to sell with an actual review of the work by the relevant community, or even review by interested laypeople. This is a marketing post where they provide no evidence that any of these are hallucinations beyond their own AI tool telling them so - and how do we know it isn't hallucinating? Are there…

Most research is funded by someone with a product to sell, not all but a frightening amount of it. VC to sell, VC to review. The burden of proof is always on the one publishing and it can be a very frustrating experience, but that is how it is, the one making the claim needs to defend themselves, from people (who can be a very big hit or miss) or machines alike. The good thing is that if this product is crap then it will quickly disappear.

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

#522

Post by cthalupa »

techpression wrote: post #521
cthalupa wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t that the whole point of publishing? No, obviously not. You're confusing a marketing post by people with a product to sell with an actual review of the work by the relevant community, or even review by interested laypeople. This is a marketing post where they provide no evidence that any of these are hallucinations beyond their own AI tool telling them so - and how do we know it isn't hallucinating? Are there…

Most research is funded by someone with a product to sell, not all but a frightening amount of it. VC to sell, VC to review. The burden of proof is always on the one publishing and it can be a very frustrating experience, but that is how it is, the one making the claim needs to defend themselves, from people (who can be a very big hit or miss) or machines alike. The good thing is that if this product is crap then it…

That's still different from a bunch of researchers being specifically put in a negative light purely to sell a product. They weren't criticized so that they could do better, be it in their own error checking if it was a human-induced issue, or not relying on LLMs to do the work they should have been. They were put on blast to sell a product.

That's quite a bit different than a study being funded by someone with a product to sell.

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

#523

Post by davidguetta »

miki123211 wrote: post #336
ls612 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multipl…

And research codebases (in AI and otherwise) are usually of extremely bad quality. It's usually a bunch of extremely poorly-written scripts, with no indication which order to run them in, how inputs and outputs should flow between them, and which specific files the scripts were run on to calculate the statistics presented in the paper.

Codebase can bé of high quality but still you have no idea how they got the paper result

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

#524

Post by aydyn »

BobbyJo wrote: post #516
michaelt wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

I am not an academic, so correct me if I am wrong, but in your example, the actual writing would probably only represent a small fraction of the time spent. Is it even worth using AI for anything other than spelling and grammar correction at that point? I think using an LLM to generate a paper from high level points wouldn't save much, if any, time if it was then reviewed the way that would require. My brother in law…

> I am not an academic, so correct me if I am wrong, but in your example, the actual writing would probably only represent a small fraction of the time spent. Is it even worth using AI for anything other than spelling and grammar correction at that point? I think using an LLM to generate a paper from high level points wouldn't save much, if any, time if it was then reviewed the way that would require.

Its understandable that you believe that, but its absolutely true that writing in academia is a huge time sink. Think about it, the first thing your reviewers are going to notice is not results but how well it is written.

If its written terribly you have lost, and it doesnt matter how good your results are at that point. Its common to spend days with your PI writing a paper to perfection, and then spend months back and forth with reviewers updating and improving the text. This is even more true the higher up you go in journal prestige.

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

#525

Post by aydyn »

neilv wrote: post #422
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…

> AI Overview > Plagiarism is using someone else's words, ideas, or work as your own without proper credit, a serious breach of ethics leading to academic failure, job loss, or legal issues, and can range from copying text (direct) to paraphrasing without citation (mosaic), often detected by software and best avoided by meticulous citation, quoting, and paraphrasing to show original thought and attribution.

Not sure if I am correctly interpreting your implicit point but

> Plagiarism is using someone else's words,

Its right there. LLM is not "someone else"; its a very useful piece of software.

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

#526

Post by soiltype »

worik wrote: post #274
soiltype wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That is good practice It is rare, not common. Managers and funders pay for features Unreliable insecure software sells very well, so making reliable secure software is a "waste of m…

Actually yes you're 100% right, I phrased that badly

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

#527

Post by soiltype »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #284
soiltype wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gra…

Hmm I see. So the grant makers are more of a problem here. And what are their incentives to fund ~bad research?

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

#528

Post by abalone »

bjourne wrote: post #493
abalone wrote: post #328

At least in one case the authors claimed to use ChatGPT to "generate the citations after giving it author-year in-text citations, titles, or their paraphrases." They pasted the hallucinations in without checking. They've since responded with corrections to real papers that in most cases are very similar to the hallucination, lending credibility to their claim.[1] Not great, but to be clear this is different from fabr…

I counted 15 hallucinated citations. The authors explanation is plausible, but it is still 15 citations to works they clearly have not read. Any university teaches you that citing sources you personally have not verified supports you claim(s) is fraudulent. Apologizing is not enough, they should retract the article.

What makes you say they "clearly have not read" their citations? Are you assuming that because they used ChatGPT to generate the citation section based on their description of the papers that they haven't read the papers? Are you suggesting that their clarifications of which real papers the ChatGPT citations were meant to map to are fake, and if so which ones?
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