New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references

btown•about 2 hours ago

> 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!

imenani•about 2 hours ago

https://xcancel.com/tdietterich/status/2055000956144935055

JumpCrisscross•about 1 hour ago

> 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.)

squirrelon•7 minutes ago

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.

bigfishrunning•about 2 hours ago

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

tengwar2•about 1 hour ago

It's not just AI, though. I did a doctorate in physics about 40 years back, and bad references were a problem back then.

lucb1e•7 minutes ago

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?

random3•about 1 hour ago

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?

Ifkaluva•about 1 hour ago

This is not about banning cheating, it’s about banning inaccurate information.

lionkor•18 minutes ago

If you use AI correctly, nobody should be able to tell that it was used at all.

Retric•about 1 hour ago

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.

pointlessone•about 1 hour ago

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.

pinkmuffinere•21 minutes ago

> 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.

kingstnap•9 minutes ago

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

New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews