Two Papers with Fake Authors Accepted as Orals Despite Reviewer Flags
I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals
We reviewed 22 submissions for NeurIPS, WACV, and TerraBytes, finding that 68% contained fabricated citations or were clearly LLM-generated. Despite flagging two papers with fake authors, both were accepted for oral presentations. This experience highlights a growing crisis where AI slop floods academic venues, wasting reviewer time and undermining the integrity of peer review.
Both papers were accepted for oral presentations with the condition that they simply fix the hallucinated references.
- nneonneo
At this point, in the field of AI research:
- papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research)
- papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not)
- papers are read, summarized and digested by AI, because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences that nobody has time to eyeball them all
We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here.
- apwheele
It is in alpha (hoping to do Show HN in a few weeks), but for those interested I am working on an application to do this, https://veruscite-data.com/
Most of the folks on HN will be more familiar with genAI tools and can just use the skill Caleb and Isaac provided in this blog post. My tool is just likely more token efficient and has a GUI where you can review the extracted bib and edit it more easily.
- bradley13
The next logical step in "publish or perish". Get rid of p-o-p and this problem will also largely disappear.
I know managers and administrators want a simple metric, but there is no simple metric for research.
- delis-thumbs-7e
I was wondering why they don’t just feed the papers first to an LLM to spot obvious slop, and I was answered later in the post:
> Submissions are confidential, bibliographies included, and the audit works by sending pieces of one to a hosted LLM – even though the LLM never writes a word of your review. ECCV 2026’s reviewing policies state that LLMs “are NOT allowed to be used to write reviews or meta-reviews, whether it is run locally or via an API,” and separately bar reviewers from sharing substantial excerpts of a submission with an LLM. WACV’s reviewer guidelines call LLM-generated reviews “highly irresponsible behavior,” sanctionable by desk rejection of the reviewer’s own papers, and their confidentiality rules forbid showing a submission’s material to anyone who is not a reviewer – which a hosted LLM is not. NeurIPS’s LLM policy restricts what reviewers can share with LLM services; its AI-assisted reviewing experiment is the sanctioned route.
So you can send some LLM generated crap to be published and even if you get caught, there is no consequences. Since your funding is likely connected to how much you publish, even if it’s toilet paper, so this system actually rewards one from spewing out shit papers no-one reads. But if you use LLM to review them, guess what, you will get punished harshly.
I think if you send in LLM crap with hallucinated citations you should get 5 year ban on even sending anything to that conference or publication. And perhaps we should create a l […]
- low_tech_love
“…because conferences have made it mandatory to review 4-5 papers if you submit to them.”
Is that really a thing? So if I submit a legit paper it is being reviewed forcefully by a bunch of random people from god knows where?
- DarkUranium
I feel like this should be treated as, and have consequences similar to, plagiarism.
Alas, it's probably just wishful thinking on my part.
- kingstnap
https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions
They should consider swapping this for a log plot.
I can imagine in 2027 academia looking like Moltbook.
- dghlsakjg
This is a side effect of academia never taking open accessibility to papers and journals seriously.
If all these papers were not gatekept by journals, it would be trivially easy to validate at least the existence of cited papers and quotes.