> the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated. For example, authors may have given an LLM a partial description of a citation and asked the LLM to produce bibtex (a formatted reference)
Maybe I'm overreacting, but this feels like an insanely biased response. They found the one potentially innocuous reason and latched onto that as a way to hand-wave the entire problem away.
Science already had a reproducibility problem, and it now has a hallucination problem. Considering the massive influence the private sector has on the both the work and the institutions themselves, the future of open science is looking bleak.
Isn't disqualifying X months of potentially great research due to a misformed, but existing reference harsh? I don't think they'd be okay with references that are actually made up.
The wording is not hand-wavy. They said "not necessarily invalidated", which could mean that innocuous reason and nothing extra.