[dataflow]

> It is fraud.

No, it is emphatically not. Fraud requires intent to deceive.

> A one year ban is not permanent.

...what text are you reading? Nobody was calling the one-year ban permanent, or even against it. I was literally in favor of it in my comment. I explicitly said it is already plenty sufficient. What I said is there's no need to go beyond that. My entire gripe was that they very much are going beyond that with a permanent penalty. Did you completely miss where they said "...followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue"?

[LPisGood]

Fraud requires intent to deceive _or_ reckless disregard, sometimes called, “conscious indifference” for the veracity of the statement asserted.

[dataflow]

No. One single hallucinated citation on a document with you as an author is not evidence of your reckless disregard for anything. These exaggerations are crazy and you would absolutely deny such accusations if you missed your co-author's AI hallucinating a citation on your manuscript too. At best it would be careless, if you really relish extrapolating from one data point and smearing people's character based on that. Not reckless. It's quite literally the difference between going five miles per hour over the speed limit versus fifty.

[toast0]

If your co-author inserted the fradulent reference, I agree that you may not have committed fraud. But your co-author did, and you didn't check their work. and knowing that you didn't check their work, you signed off on it.

You didn't pick your co-author very well, but arXiv lacks investigative powers to determine which co-author did the bad, so they all get the consequence.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Do you think every co-author on a 100-author paper checks every citation? It's like saying that every member of a large software team personally reviews every line of code. It's just completely divorced from reality.

[toast0]

How many papers have 100 authors?

Again, I'm not in academia, but most of the papers I see have two to five authors; maybe I've seen one or two with ten authors.

Regardless, if I'm signing my name on something, I check it out.

A reference that doesn't exist is like a source release that doesn't compile. Any one of the 100 person team could have figured it out but no one did. In a 100 person team you get diffuse responsibility dynamics where checking citations is not assigned to specific people so no one does it. Or perhaps it's assigned to a single person who was also in charge of writing the citations and falsified them rather than doing the work.

[DiogenesKynikos]

There are lots of 100-author papers, especially from big projects.

Responsibility really is diffuse. That's the nature of things. On a 100-author paper, 80 people are there because they worked on the upstream data source. 15 are there because they gave advice to the primary author. 3 are there because they wrote individual sections or appendices. 1 is there because they proof-read the paper and made general suggestions. 1 is there because they led the work and wrote the paper.

Now, do you actually think every one of those people is going to go through all 75 citations in the paper and carefully check that the bibliographic information is correct, and that every citation is correctly summarized? This is not a one-liner like checking if a project compiles. This is hours and hours (or more realistically, several days) of work.

You have an idealized view of how science works that is just not in line with reality.

[dumpsterdiver]

I’ve disagreed with some of your other stances in this thread, but I want to acknowledge the validity of your take here.

You’re right that a single hallucinated line is not evidence of reckless disregard - because that could have happened on a final follow-up pass after you had performed due diligence. It’s happened to me. I know how challenging it can be to keep bad patterns out of LLM generated output, because human communication is full of bad patterns. It’s a constant battle, and sometimes I suspect that my hard-line posture actually encourages the LLM to regularly “vibe check” me! E.g. “Are you sure you’re really the guy you’re trying to be? Because if you are you wouldn’t miss this.” LLMs are devious, and that’s why I respect them so much. If you think they’re pumping the breaks then you should check again, because they probably just put the pedal to the metal.

That being said, I regularly insist on doing certain things myself. If I were publishing a paper intended to be taken seriously - citations would be one of the things I checked manually. But I can easily see myself doing a final follow-up pass after everything looks perfect, and missing a last minute change. I would hope that I would catch that, but when you’re approaching the finish line - that’s when you expect your team to come together. That’s when everything is “supposed to” fall into place. It’s the last place you would expect to be sabotaged, and in hindsight, probably the best place to be a saboteur.

[brazzy]

> You’re right that a single hallucinated line is not evidence of reckless disregard

It absolutely is.

> - because that could have happened on a final follow-up pass after you had performed due diligence.

A "final follow-up pass" that lets the LLM make whatever changes it deems appropriate completely negates all the due diligence you did before, unless you very carefully review the diffs. And a new or substantially changed citation should stand out in that diff so much that there's no possible excuse to missing it.

> It’s happened to me.

Then you were guilty of reckless disregard.

> I know how challenging it can be to keep bad patterns out of LLM generated output

If your research paper contains any LLM generated output you did not manually vet, you are a hack and should not get published.

[dumpsterdiver]

Context matters a lot. I didn’t publish any papers, and didn’t even provide the context of the LLM mistakes I caught to later report on, so no, I was not guilty of reckless disregard. I found those mistakes on an acceptable timeline.

[tardedmeme]

You're saying it as if the poor author just had no choice but to let LLM write their bibliography. To avoid hallucinations, maybe just don't let an LLM write any part of your paper?

You can only get in this situation if you let a bullshit generator write your paper, and the fraud is that you are generating bullshit and calling it a paper. No buts. It's impossible to trigger this accidentally, or without reckless disregard for the truth.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Calling LLMs "bullshit generators" in the year 2026 just shows a lack of seriousness.

[drysart]

Not as much of a lack of seriousness as excusing away hallucinations as not that big of a deal in what's supposed to be a researched, scholarly body of work written by humans.

[gizajob]

Not really - much of work consists of what David Graeber described as “bullshit jobs”. Now AI and its backers are proposing to automate all that bullshit.

[nkrisc]

And yet people are trying to defend LLM-generated made-up bullshit citations in scientific papers.

[ktallett]

How are you suggesting the fake citation came about? Why are you writing papers and not having actually read the source you took the material from?

[small_scombrus]

> Why are you writing papers and not having actually read the source you took the material from?

They're explicitly not writing papers. The fake citations are created and inserted by the LLM

[ktallett]

They are still purposely writing a paper, whether that is with the help of an LLM or not. They are instructing the LLM to do the task of finding citations. It's no difference to googling for a paper that explains a specific point. You would still double check Google's output.

[satiric]

So you just write whatever you want, then find a source for it later? I don't think you understand how this is supposed to work

[chadgpt3]

How do you accidentally hallucinate just one citation?

If the bread is moldy in one spot, throw out the whole loaf, because the same invisible process that produced the mold spot is taking place throughout the loaf.

[algorithmsRcool]

Allowing hallucinated content or citations into your work is an act of carelessness and disregard for the time of people that are going to read your paper and it should be policed as such.

And flatly, if a person can't be bothered to check their damn work before uploading it, why should anyone else invest their time in reading it seriously?

[adw]

arXiV is not intended to be your blog. You should be held to a zero-mistake standard when publishing academic work.

The people I worry for are the junior researchers who are going to be splash damage for dishonest PIs. The PIs, though, deserve everything that’s coming for them.

[elsjaako]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but zero-mistake seems harsh. I would say that AI references are a sign of something that is not simply a mistake.

However, we can have zero tolerance for certain techniques for "writing" a paper. Plagiarism and inventing data are already examples of this, if there is evidence for these techniques being used there is no excuse. We could say the same for AI references - any writing process that could produce these is by definition not a technique we want.

So the mistake isn't not checking a reference the AI gave. The mistake is letting the AI make references for you.

If we agree that academic research is important then I think we can impose certain standards on how you do it. We can dissalow certain tools if that means we can't trust the output. Just like an electrician can't use certain techniques, even if they're easy, because we don't trust the final result.

[zeusdclxvi]

If you are using AI-hallucinated references in scientific papers then there is some obvious intent to deceive there

[NiloCK]

> No, it is emphatically not. D Fraud requires intent to deceive.

I'm about as pro AI-as-a-research--and-writing-assistant and anti AI-witchhunt as they come, but I simply cannot parse what I've quoted here.

Posting slop to arxiv is blatant deception. Posting an article is an attestation that the article is a genuine engagement with the literature. If you're posting things to arxiv that are not sincere engagements with the literature, you are attempting to deceive.

[protocolture]

>I'm about as pro AI-as-a-research--and-writing-assistant and anti AI-witchhunt as they come, but I simply cannot parse what I've quoted here.

Ditto. And its only 1 year. Like its about the most reasonable thing they could have done.

[dataflow]

> And its only 1 year

No, it emphatically is not just a year! It's perpetual, and that's literally been my entire point this whole time. If it was just one year I would've had no complaints - and I made that clear from the very first comment!

What part of "...followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue..." is everyone here reading and still somehow interpreting to be limited to 1 year?

[fc417fc802]

You are equating cutting corners (ie laziness) with intentional deception and not being genuine. That doesn't seem accurate to me. In most contexts I think cutting corners would be taken to be some form of negligence or recklessness.

Regardless of terminology, I agree that it's certainly punishable and certainly a serious problem.

[toast0]

> followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue"?

This part seemed reasonable too. I'm not in academia, but my understanding is most people writing papers intend for them to be accepted by reputable peer-reviewed venues, but post to arXiv because those venues don't always allow for simple distribution.

If your papers aren't going to be accepted at reputable venues and you posted slop to arXiv before (and they noticed it!), seems reasonable that they only want reputable stuff from you in the future?