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.
yes there will be rare exceptions but in general i feel like this is a really good addition.
What SOTA models are not hallucination prone?
if someone writes a paper and an entirely different person takes credit for it without even bothering to check if the actual writer just made shit up, they deserve a lifetime ban. seems like a year is a very light punishment.
Assumptions:
1. The entire document is loaded into an AI editor
2. The researcher is asking an AI editor to work on his references
3. The researcher has not checked his own references.
This could be avoided at 1, 2 or 3. But even just 1 implies that the researcher knows that they have a hot potato and might critically fuck up and lose all credibility. Being in that scenario and committing to 2 and 3 is at least extreme negligence.
If someone cannot meet that bar, they have no business publishing research papers. I have written academic papers myself, and I find it astonishing that people are trying to justify this as if it were some understandable workflow mistake. At that point it is simply slop with academic formatting. Post it on a blog or somewhere else, but do not put it into the scientific record.
A one-year ban is not a lifetime ban. Maybe six months would also have been enough, but the author can use that time to think about whether they should verify references next time — and to manually check every other citation.
Deadlines are not an excuse here. Checking whether a cited book, paper, or passage exists is the absolute minimum standard for scientific work, not an optional extra. I have written academic papers myself, and I find it astonishing that people are trying to justify this as if it were some understandable workflow mistake. At that point it is simply slop with academic formatting.
A one-year ban is not a lifetime ban. Maybe six months would also have been enough, but the point is that the author gets time to think about whether they should verify references next time. They can also use that time to manually check every other citation.
Indeed I cannot. If you do that, you are not, in fact, an honest researcher. You're a lazy hack.