81–90 of 442 posts
Maybe there just is no incentive for this type of activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…
> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? > They are also assuming good faith. I can only relate this to…
Yes in theory you can go through every semicolon to check if it's not actually a greek question mark; but one assumes good faith and baseline competence such that you as the reviewer would generally not be expected to perform such pedantic checks.
So if you think you might have reasonably missed greek question marks in a visual code review, then hopefully you can also appreciate how a paper reviewer might miss a false citation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? > They are also assuming good faith. I can only relate this to…
> I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? No. Modern peer review is “how can I do minimum possible work so I can write ‘ICLR Reviewer 2025’ on my personal website”
I don't know, I still think this describes most of the reviews I've seen
I just hope most devs that do this know better than to admit to it.
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 like the problem was there all along, all LLMs did was expose it more
This is as much a failing of "peer review" as anything. Importantly, it is an intrinsic failure, which won't go away even if LLMs were to go away completely. Peer review doesn't catch errors. Acting as if it does, and thus assuming the fact of publication (and where it was published) are indicators of veracity is simply unfounded. We need to go back to the food fight system where everyone publishes whatever they want…
I'm not sure why you think this isn't the case?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…
> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? > They are also assuming good faith. I can only relate this to…
Ph.D. in neuroscience here. Programmer by trade. This is not true. Less you know about most peer revies is better.
The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check references. Unless they are citing something they are familiar with and you are using it wrong then they will likely complain. Or they find some unknown citations very relevant to their work, they will read.
I don't have a great analogy to draw here. peer review is usually a thankless and unpaid work so there is unlikely to be any motivation for fraud detection unless it somehow affects your work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…
Surely there are tools to retrieve all the citations, publishers should spot it easily. However the paper is submitted, like a folder on a cloud drive, just have them include a folder with PDFs/abstracts of all the citations? They might then fraudulently produce papers to cite, but they can't cite something that doesn't exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I gave you a gun would you start shooting people just because you had one?
If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough? The problem with this analogy is that it makes no sense. LLMs aren’t guns. The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy. And that gets tiresome because the whole point is that the LLM saves you time and effort doing it yourself. So naturally people will tend to…
That's the issue here. Of course you should be aware of the fact that these things need to be checked - especially if you're a scientist.
This is no secret only known to people on HN. LLMs are tools. People using these tools need to be diligent.
This is as much a failing of "peer review" as anything. Importantly, it is an intrinsic failure, which won't go away even if LLMs were to go away completely. Peer review doesn't catch errors. Acting as if it does, and thus assuming the fact of publication (and where it was published) are indicators of veracity is simply unfounded. We need to go back to the food fight system where everyone publishes whatever they want…
It's much more useful if everyone including the janitor and their mom can have a say on your code before you're allowed to move to your next commit.
(/s, in case it's not obvious :D )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I gave you a gun would you start shooting people just because you had one?
Ok sure I'm down for this hypothetical. I will bring 50 random people in front of you, and you will hand all 50 of them loaded guns. Still feeling it?