> The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue.
This is incredibly good for science. arXiv is free, but it's a privilege not a right!
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.
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
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.
> It's not the kind of mistake that is possible unless you're engaging in fraud anyway.
Seriously? You can't fathom an honest researcher asking for AI to find a citation they know exists, and the AI inserting or modifying a citation incorrectly without them realizing?
If you find evidence of fraud by all means lay down the hammer. Using a single hallucinated citation like it's some kind of ironclad proxy just because you think they must be committing fraud is insane.
> Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated (Dieterrich, T. G.)
Had a colleague submit a paper with literal AI slop left in the text, got hit with a nasty revision request. Check your drafts before you submit, people. The reviewers will find it.
Good; academic literature is in crisis because of all of the slop. Forcing some consequences on easily-detectable hallucinations can only be a good thing
In what way? Surely something like the source not quite saying what was cited, mixing up citations (meaning to reference Joe but citing Hill for some claim instead, when both are referenced in the article in general); like, not just inventing them from scratch because it makes the text look like the training data, right?
It seems a good idea to ban cheating, but how hard is it, especially in new reasoning/agents contexts to validate references?
The deeper question is whether legitimate AI generated results are allowed or not?
Test - In the extreme - think proof of Riemann Hypothesis autonomously generated (end to end) formally proven - is it allowed or not?
There already exists multiple tools for automatically verifying references. This measure will likely only filter out the laziest and most incompetent of AI slop submissions. It's a very modest raising of the bar, but comes at zero cost to honest researchers.
I expect arXiv will still have problems with slop submissions but, at least, their references should actually exist going forward.
It isn't "cheating" they're concerned with, it's sloppiness. This dictum isn't some sort of AI ban, but instead simply that if there is evidence that it was so low effort that the work includes such blatant problems, it's just adding noise.
> think proof of Riemann Hypothesis autonomously generated (end to end) formally proven - is it allowed or not?
Sorry to be rude, but this seems like a dumb question. I want science to progress. A primary purpose of these journals is to progress science. A full proof of the Riemann Hypothesis progresses science. I don't care how it was produced, if Hitler is coauthor, etc, I just care that it is correct. Whether the authors should be rewarded for whatever methods they used can be a separate question.
Terence Tao had a nice talk from the Future of Mathematics conference posted yesterday [0] that shapes a lot of my own feelings on this matter.
The short of it is he argues how first to correctness shouldn't be the only goal / isn't a great optimisation incentive. Presentation and digestibility of correct results is a missing 1/3 when you've finished generation and verification. I completely agree with him. You don't just need an AI generated proof of the Reimann Hypothesis. You would really like it to be intentional and structured for others to understand.
A really beautiful quote I learned of in the talk is this:
> "We are not trying to meet some abstract production quota of definitions, theorems, and proofs. The measure of our success is whether what we do enables people to understand and think more clearly and effectively about math." - William Thurston
> The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue.
This is incredibly good for science. arXiv is free, but it's a privilege not a right!
I'm not seeing this clearly listed on https://info.arxiv.org/help/policies/index.html so it's possible this is planned but not live yet - or perhaps I'm not digging deeply enough?
As a certain doctor once said: the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!
> 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.
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
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.
It's not the kind of mistake that is possible unless you're engaging in fraud anyway.
> It's not the kind of mistake that is possible unless you're engaging in fraud anyway.
Seriously? You can't fathom an honest researcher asking for AI to find a citation they know exists, and the AI inserting or modifying a citation incorrectly without them realizing?
If you find evidence of fraud by all means lay down the hammer. Using a single hallucinated citation like it's some kind of ironclad proxy just because you think they must be committing fraud is insane.
Don't use AI? Problem solved?
https://xcancel.com/tdietterich/status/2055000956144935055
> Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated (Dieterrich, T. G.)
Had a colleague submit a paper with literal AI slop left in the text, got hit with a nasty revision request. Check your drafts before you submit, people. The reviewers will find it.
Good; academic literature is in crisis because of all of the slop. Forcing some consequences on easily-detectable hallucinations can only be a good thing
It's not just AI, though. I did a doctorate in physics about 40 years back, and bad references were a problem back then.
Doesn't matter if it is AI hallucinations or entirely human scientific fraud, the problem is the same, and the solution works fine for both cases.
If you can't validate that your bibliography is full of real articles, you shouldn't get published.
LLMs have just poured gasoline on the fire.
"Bad", like, you literally just made them up? I hope that would have been a problem.
In what way? Surely something like the source not quite saying what was cited, mixing up citations (meaning to reference Joe but citing Hill for some claim instead, when both are referenced in the article in general); like, not just inventing them from scratch because it makes the text look like the training data, right?
Yes and ffs arrows kill people too but we don't bring that up every time we talk about what to do with guns.
It seems a good idea to ban cheating, but how hard is it, especially in new reasoning/agents contexts to validate references?
The deeper question is whether legitimate AI generated results are allowed or not? Test - In the extreme - think proof of Riemann Hypothesis autonomously generated (end to end) formally proven - is it allowed or not?
This is not about banning cheating, it’s about banning inaccurate information.
It is allowed as long as it’s verified.
The thread specifically points out that if authors can’t be arsed to simply proofread their text the rest can not be trusted either.
It’s a simple heuristic against low quality submissions, not an anti-ai measure.
If you use AI correctly, nobody should be able to tell that it was used at all.
You don’t need to solve everything, catching a few thousand non existent citations with such a policy is on its own a net benefit.
There already exists multiple tools for automatically verifying references. This measure will likely only filter out the laziest and most incompetent of AI slop submissions. It's a very modest raising of the bar, but comes at zero cost to honest researchers.
I expect arXiv will still have problems with slop submissions but, at least, their references should actually exist going forward.
It isn't "cheating" they're concerned with, it's sloppiness. This dictum isn't some sort of AI ban, but instead simply that if there is evidence that it was so low effort that the work includes such blatant problems, it's just adding noise.
> think proof of Riemann Hypothesis autonomously generated (end to end) formally proven - is it allowed or not?
Sorry to be rude, but this seems like a dumb question. I want science to progress. A primary purpose of these journals is to progress science. A full proof of the Riemann Hypothesis progresses science. I don't care how it was produced, if Hitler is coauthor, etc, I just care that it is correct. Whether the authors should be rewarded for whatever methods they used can be a separate question.
Terence Tao had a nice talk from the Future of Mathematics conference posted yesterday [0] that shapes a lot of my own feelings on this matter.
The short of it is he argues how first to correctness shouldn't be the only goal / isn't a great optimisation incentive. Presentation and digestibility of correct results is a missing 1/3 when you've finished generation and verification. I completely agree with him. You don't just need an AI generated proof of the Reimann Hypothesis. You would really like it to be intentional and structured for others to understand.
A really beautiful quote I learned of in the talk is this:
> "We are not trying to meet some abstract production quota of definitions, theorems, and proofs. The measure of our success is whether what we do enables people to understand and think more clearly and effectively about math." - William Thurston
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc2zt198U_U