gold23's comments

On: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

[gold23]

*expose the problem

On: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

[gold23]

Obviously a post on a startup's blog will be more editorialized than an academic paper. Still, this seems like an important discussion to have.

On: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

[gold23]

Nonetheless this investigation is important to anyone with a stronger desire to preserve intellectual honesty than disdain for a company trying to expand their offering.

On: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

[gold23]

It's not the equivalent of a typo. A typo would be immediately apparent to the reader. This is a semantic error that is much less likely to be caught by the reader.

On: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

[gold23]

Why don't you look at the actual article? There are several more egregious examples, e.g., the authors being cited as "John Smith and Jane Doe"

[ted_dunning → gold23]

I can see that either way. It could also be a placeholder until the actual author list is inserted. This could happen if you know the title, but not the authors and insert a temporary reference entry.

[gs17 → ted_dunning]

The first Doe and Smith example I could give that to (the title is real and the arxiv ID they give is "arXiv:2401.00001", which is definitely placeholder), but the second one doesn't match a title and has fake URL/DOI that don't actually go anywhere. There's a few that are unambiguously placeholders, but they really should have been caught in review for a conference this high up.

[mikkupikku → gs17]

How does a "placeholder citation" even happens? Either enter the citation properly now, or do it properly later. What role does a "placeholder citation" serve, besides giving you something to forget about and fuck up?

I do not believe the placeholder citation theory at all.