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by tardedmeme 36 days ago
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.

1 comments

Calling LLMs "bullshit generators" in the year 2026 just shows a lack of seriousness.
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.
In 2026, LLMs are highly intelligent. In many ways, they even surpass human intelligence and ability. Dismissing them as "bullshit generators" is utterly unserious, and shows that one does not want to deal with the reality of the situation.

I don't see anyone excusing hallucinated citations. I see people arguing that this is an overreaction by the arXiv. AI is going to become a major part of research, including in writing papers. It would be better if people would freak out a little less about that fact.

Hallucinating citations is “generating bullshit” in the purest sense.
Like humans, LLMs sometimes bullshit. That doesn't mean it's in any way reasonable to dismiss LLMs in general as "bullshit generators."
Maybe, maybe not, but clearly using them to generate bullshit citations is acting with disregard for the truth.
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.
And yet people are trying to defend LLM-generated made-up bullshit citations in scientific papers.