AI Judge changed title after evaluation, original title: "arXiv imposes one-year ban for unchecked LLM output"
arXiv has clarified penalties for submissions containing unverified LLM-generated content. Papers showing hallucinated references or leftover AI meta-comments now trigger a one-year platform ban. After the ban, authors must first secure acceptance at a reputable peer-reviewed venue before resubmitting. Thomas G. Dietterich of Oregon State University outlined the updated rules in a public thread that researchers have since shared widely.
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. 4/
We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper. 3/
Many users back arXiv's one-year ban on papers with hallucinated references as fair and needed, while others respond with insults calling AI users a disease or demanding AI be banned outright.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
hallucinated references will land you a 1-year ban from arxiv now. wow
arxiv imposing a 1 year ban on authors who submit hallucinated references is good. Authors should be able to write with AI but need to be fully accountable for catching that level of error. Doesn't matter if humans also sometimes cite non-existent things. 1 year ban them too.
There's a lot of controversy brewing around arXiv's decision to penalize authors who post unchecked AI generated content.
The impulse is correct, IMO, simply on grounds of efficiency: it is much cheaper to insist the authors vet their work first, rather than distributing the cost of that work to EVERY reader/agent who subsequently downloads the work.
I believe the mechanism is likely the wrong one, however. Unfortunately, suggestions to use github are even worse, IMO, because they lose the (effective) immutability of the scientific record, which arXiv upholds.
⚠️Do you use arXiv? Don't miss this important note on their policy regarding LLM-generated papers:
“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.”
Attention @arxiv authors: 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. 1/
Steep penalties for submitting AI slop to the arXiv.
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. 4/
If you AI agents assist writing your paper and don't want to go to arXiv jail, our recent work publishes a tool that mitigates bibtex citation hallucination via the agent's skill interface. You will have to add something like "use the clibib skill to discover new bibtex citations and check existing ones". Link below 👇
hallucinated references will land you a 1-year ban from arxiv now. wow
Examples of incontrovertible evidence: hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM ("here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?"; "the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments") end/
If arXiv decides to do active gate checking on LLM slops, it also has the responsibility to release the stats on rejection rate and on hold delay, and explain the decision making process in more transparency.
Big move from arXiv: a one-year ban for authors who submit AI-generated content without proper checking.
This is not about banning AI from academia.
AI can be extremely useful. It can help us write better, think more clearly, analyse faster.
But unchecked AI use is different.
Hallucinated references. LLM meta-comments left in the text. These papers are not just bad papers. They are poisoning science.
So I think this is a big and important move. And I hope journals will follow.
AI should raise the quality of science.
Not flood it with plausible nonsense.
@roydanroy Keep Arxiv the way it is, this makes little sense. It's a repository not a gated venue, and that's good.
Steep penalties for submitting AI slop to the arXiv.
Use @HarmonicMath Aristotle to avoid the ArXiv ban
hallucinated references will land you a 1-year ban from arxiv now. wow
arXiv was never high SNR. it has had slop way before LLMs and a fake P=NP proof once a month for two decades and has always been usable. Its strength was never the average correctness of papers on it, but open access to text and artifacts, and easy way to reference work. Correctness gets established downstream by people who actually use the work
@DimitrisPapail @roydanroy This is a policy question that we think about often. How low can the signal::noise ratio go before arXiv becomes unusable? Our main goal in moderation is to keep non-scientific-papers off of arXiv.
@andrewwhite01 hallucinated references are pretty bad i think, idk if the punishment is commensurate but its good to penalize this i think
the thread
IMHO, the whole notion of an immutable and sacrosanct “paper” as THE main unit of scientific work output has been outdated by at least a few decades. The arrival of AI and knowledge-work-as-a-service is only making this fact more obvious, and in practical terms untenable going forward.
I am quite convinced that, under these arxive guidelines, every single major PI in the field will be banned within a few years
clibib is a Python package and an agent skill for fetching citations through natural language or the /clibib slash command. Works with any agent that supports the open standard — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenHands, GitHub Copilot, and others. https://github.com/delip/clibib
If you AI agents assist writing your paper and don't want to go to arXiv jail, our recent work publishes a tool that mitigates bibtex citation hallucination via the agent's skill interface. You will have to add something like "use the clibib skill to discover new bibtex citations and check existing ones". Link below 👇
I don't know what's going to happen to the concept of a paper (or at least its evaluation) 2-3 years from now. But the last time there was an epidemic of slop, you had vixra. No gatekeeping. But this time we might be destined for a web where everything becomes one massive viXra.
@DimitrisPapail I see your points, but I think you may also be discounting just how curated Arxiv already is. @tdietterich and others reject a ton of low-quality submissions. There are problems with the LLM proposal, but the mods want to maintain something similar to the current quality bar.
Found myself posting papers to GitHub instead of arXiv lately. No gatekeeping, is in the same repo as the code, one link for everything, and gets uploaded immediately. Makes you wonder what arXiv's actual value is.
@roydanroy Surprised to see comments by professors here about gatekeeping. They seem to have forgotten that you couldn't submit to arXiv directly unless you had a .edu ID. If you were outside academia, you needed an endorsement to be able to submit. This has been the case for 15 years.
There's a lot of controversy brewing around arXiv's decision to penalize authors who post unchecked AI generated content.
The impulse is correct, IMO, simply on grounds of efficiency: it is much cheaper to insist the authors vet their work first, rather than distributing the cost of that work to EVERY reader/agent who subsequently downloads the work.
I believe the mechanism is likely the wrong one, however. Unfortunately, suggestions to use github are even worse, IMO, because they lose the (effective) immutability of the scientific record, which arXiv upholds.
@andrewwhite01 @jessesingal As is appropriate. Note that they're not penalizing all AI usage, just the sort that demonstrates incompetence. If your AI workflow is letting hallucinations and copy-pasted LLMisms into the final doc, it's slop, and you have no business letting anyone read it.
