arXiv introduces a one-year submission ban for authors uploading papers with unverified AI-generated content such as hallucinated references and residual LLM meta-comments
AI Judge changed title after evaluation, original title: "arXiv enacts one-year ban on unverified AI-generated papers"
Researchers note inconsistent enforcement compared to unpunished human errors like unedited TODO notes and discuss alternatives such as reputational sanctions or automated verification systems.
Users call arXiv's rules against papers with unverified LLM results or hallucinated citations an overreaction that ignores helpful tools, while others support them to keep science reliable.
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The reactions of many researchers on finally being held responsible for having read the very paper they submitted are... something.
The funniest thing about #arxivgate is that it’s going to drive everyone to use AIs to ensure their papers are in compliance because AIs are literally the only entity with the patience to read an entire paper.
if you get caught submitting AI slop to arxiv, the punishment should be generational aura loss
My issue with "you just need to read the paper" crowd: if I upload a paper with "TODO: Tom, please edit" in a caption nothing happens; so it feels weird to asymmetrically punish a mistake because AI was involved (and yes, mistakes can happen).
Although I generally feel something should be done about arXiv, I can understand the backlash given the severity of the proposed punishment. Could we at least institute a points-based system, like for a driving licence? A direct one-year ban, plus losing the ability to share unpublished work on arXiv, seems too harsh.
That said, failing to notice that a reference is incorrect is different from submitting a paper that contains an AI prompt, which could literally be detected by reading the said paper.
i see many variations of this claim. my read is that the premise is false. arxiv (rightfully) care about fighting AI slop. hallucinated citations just happen to be very easy to spot and very hard to dispute, so an easy target.
If @arxiv really cared about citations they’d impose penalties on authors for the WAY bigger problem of authors citing real papers in bogus ways. What’s the sanction for citing the wrong paper? Or for claiming a paper said something that it didn’t? Or for citing someone to scratch their back?
I strongly agree with the @arxiv ban on hallucinated references but it makes me wonder if papers are even the right format to disseminate knowledge now? If it is LLMs all the way down: writing, coding, reviewing, citing then we've automated a wrapper around the science. A narrative makes sense when you have one, not when it's forced. Maybe it's time to automate the verification instead. Agentic harnesses where you submit code and data, not a story?

@DellAnnaLuca I'm convinced only about 10% of college grads and grad students today would have passed and gotten their degrees 40 years ago.

@SianGooding @arxiv Glad that we are thinking about the same thing! Strip out the storying telling from research paper! We prose agent native research artifact, from conceptual level claims, implementation, ground truth results and to exploration trajectory
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24658
The easiest way to avoid the arxivgate: use AI. Agents are good at this.
It will force people against AI to use AI to check their papers out of fear as human make mistakes, and then they might fall in love with AI, which would be funny.
The funniest thing about #arxivgate is that it’s going to drive everyone to use AIs to ensure their papers are in compliance because AIs are literally the only entity with the patience to read an entire paper.
"Dad, why do the other kids say I have no rizz?"
"Well son, let me tell you about a mistake your grandfather made decades ago with a model called Haiku 4.5...."
This is kind of a shitpost but unironically, reputations (good and bad) should be well known and have some persistence. This is especially true given AI tools.

@CurmudgeonlyOpa Raising graduation rates beyond a certain point was mistake

@DellAnnaLuca the guy horrified that an author has to check his own citations and be able to read them if in a different language slays me.
This is kind of a shitpost but unironically, reputations (good and bad) should be well known and have some persistence. This is especially true given AI tools.
if you get caught submitting AI slop to arxiv, the punishment should be generational aura loss

@DellAnnaLuca How is this even remotely controversial? You only put citations in a paper you've read, yes.
This is such an ironic move by arxiv - exactly when codex can actually check your bibtex better than yourself.
How do you like to spend your time?

@Tezkiya I love how instead of calling them “researchers”, you call them “people who submit research papers”

@BarraZanzi
Pretty much. All punitive measures are feeble attempts to match this goal
if you get caught submitting AI slop to arxiv, the punishment should be generational aura loss

@DellAnnaLuca Lowering entrance criteria was worse. It was all about increasing the "consumer" base in order to support higher salaries for "academics". Watched it happen in real time.

It’s a description of current practices. Of course people could. They just (empirically) don’t. And here I mean every bit of a paper. Every detail of every method and every piece of supplementary material and data file, not just the main text (which also most people don’t read, but anyways).