What did GPTZero find at the NeurIPS conference?

GPTZero discovered 100 fake citations across 51 papers accepted by the NeurIPS conference.

Why are hallucinated citations a problem for AI researchers?

Hallucinated citations can water down the value of real citations and impact a researcher's career metrics.

How does the AI submission surge affect conferences like NeurIPS?

The high volume of AI submissions strains review pipelines, making it harder to detect errors like fake citations.

Home / Technology / AI Fails: Fake Citations Plague Top AI Conference

AI Fails: Fake Citations Plague Top AI Conference

22 Jan

•

Summary

GPTZero found 100 fake citations across 51 papers at NeurIPS.
Faked citations can undermine researcher career metrics.
AI submission surge strains conference review pipelines.

AI Fails: Fake Citations Plague Top AI Conference

An AI detection startup has uncovered a troubling trend at a major AI conference: hallucinated citations generated by artificial intelligence. GPTZero analyzed 4,841 papers accepted by the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), identifying 100 confirmed fake citations spread across 51 submissions.

While the number of affected papers represents a small fraction of the total, the presence of fabricated references among leading AI researchers is a concern. Citations are crucial for academic careers, and their artificial inflation can devalue scholarly work and mislead reviewers.

The issue underscores the immense pressure on academic conferences due to a “submission tsunami” of AI-generated content. This influx strains review pipelines, making it difficult for even peer reviewers to catch AI-generated errors.