tech
January 21, 2026
Irony alert: Hallucinated citations found in papers from NeurIPS, the prestigious AI conference
Research from startup GPTZero points to the impossible problem prestigious conferences face in the age of AI slop.
TL;DR
- GPTZero scanned 4,841 papers accepted by NeurIPS and found 100 hallucinated citations across 51 papers.
- The number of fake citations is not statistically significant when compared to the total number of citations in all papers.
- NeurIPS stated that incorrect references due to LLM use do not necessarily invalidate the content of the papers.
- Faked citations devalue the currency of citations for researchers and compromise the rigor of scholarly publishing.
- GPTZero suggests that the volume of AI-generated content has strained conference review pipelines.
- The incident raises concerns about the accuracy of LLM usage by leading AI experts and its implications for the general public.