alt Hacker News> This is incredibly good for science.
I disagree. It's just one darn hallucinated citation for heaven's sake, not fraud or something. It doesn't account for the substance or quality of their work at all. A one-year ban seems plenty sufficient for a minor first time mistake like this. People make mistakes and a good fraction of them can learn from those mistakes. There's no need to permanently cripple someone's ability to progress their life or contribute to humanity just because an AI hallucinated a reference one time in their life. That's punitive instead of rehabilitative.
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A "mistake" would be a typo in a real citation. A hallucinated citation is evidence of just plain laziness and negligence, which taints the entire submission.
If you cannot be bothered to check your references when writing academic quality papers then you have no place writing them in the first place. The punishment is not chopping off a finger, it is a polite reminder to do the bare minimum.
It's not the kind of mistake that is possible unless you're engaging in fraud anyway.
What's the difference between a "hallucinated" citation and consciously inserting reference to a non-existent paper and hopping it goes unnoticed? How do we determine which one was done consciously and which was "a minor first time mistake"?
Your standards are lower than what they would accept at my high-school. Seriously.
And generally, if you are generating papers with LLMs, let other LLMs read them. Why would we waste human hours considering something that was generated? At this point publish your prompt because that's the actual work you're doing.
A citation is where you derived knowledge... If you haven't checked it and you are submitting something that should represent a ton of labour (and which will consume labour to review), you don't understand what you're doing. It is not just crossing T's and dotting I'd.
Your being set behind is less important than the fact that your publishing is setting everyone else behind.
Such a banned person is being helped to "step out of the way", and someone more competent will assuredly step forward to consume the limited maintenance labour more thoughtfully
Yes, it is fraud
Don't use AI? Problem solved?
You are being ironic right?
> There's no need to permanently cripple someone's ability to progress their life or contribute to humanity
I don't think you need to publish on arXive to contribute meaningfully to humanity.
> That's punitive instead of rehabilitative.
Unfortunately science is competitive. Yours is a race to the bottom where the people who can afford the most expensive models and who are least concerned with the truth can publish the most papers and benefit financially and professionally by doing so. This is not a zero sum arena, grant money and opportunities will possibly be rewarded to them, and not to another team who is producing more careful and genuine output.
> It's just one darn hallucinated citation for heaven's sake, not fraud or something.
It is fraud.
> It doesn't account for the substance or quality of their work at all.
References are part of the work. If you're making up the references, what else are you making up?
> People make mistakes and a good fraction of them can learn from those mistakes. There's no need to permanently cripple someone's ability to progress their life or contribute to humanity just because an AI hallucinated a reference one time in their life.
A one year ban is not permanent. Having a negative consequence for making poor decisions seems like an inducement to learn from the mistake?
In an ideal world, one would be keeping notes on references used while doing the research that lead to writing the paper. Choosing not to do that is one poor decision.
Having a positive outlook, if asking an AI to provide references that may have been missed, one should at least verify the references exist and are relevant. Choosing not to do that is also a poor decision, even if one did take notes on references used while researching.