Mikel Artetxe on Twitter / X

“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science

For years, spurious journals have proliferated online, promising academic credibility in exchange for cash.

Fraudulent citations, blamed on AI hallucinations, are becoming more common in research papers

“Fabricated” citations that do not reference real academic papers are spreading in the literature, polluting the public record of science, a new study found

Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations by @alexcdot(Alex Cui) | Twitter Thread Reader

Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations I don't think people realize how bad the slop is right now It's not just that researchers from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @MIT, @Cambridge_Uni are using AI - they allowed LLMs to generate hallucinations in their papers and didn't notice at all. It's insane that these made it through peer review👇

Eric Topol on Twitter / X

This is a FRAUDULENT paper, AI-generated. My name was used as an author and I had nothing to do with it, never saw it until today https://t.co/Ky60zJrMEZThe "Editors" Angelo Rossi Mori, David Mensah, and Zarnie Khadjesari should be reported. pic.twitter.com/2Z5CE8w4bn— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 22, 2026

Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration

Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year, which—if unchecked—will damage the scientific and economic progress of our societies. The result is editor and reviewer fatigue, irreproducible experiments, misguided experiments, disinformation and escalating costs that devour funding from taxpayers intended for research. It is high time to reevaluate current publishing models and outline a global plan to stop this unhealthy development. A conference was therefore organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to draft an action plan with specific recommendations, as follows. (i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). (ii) Adjust incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity, in a reputation economy where the gaming of publication numbers and citation metrics distorts the perception of academic excellence. (iii) Implement mechanisms to prevent and detect fake publications and fraud which are independent of publishers. (iv) Draft and implement legislations, regulations and policies to increase publishing quality and integrity. This is a call to action for universities, academies, science organizations and funders to unite and join this effort.

Thomas G. Dietterich on Twitter / X

We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/— Thomas G. Dietterich (@tdietterich) September 13, 2026

Q&A from the slop trenches – GeoSpatial ML

We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.

Itai Yanai on Twitter / X

Is the scientific paper a fraud? Peter Medawar (Nobel Prize winner) suggested that publications are overly structured and formal, giving only a sanitized version of the discovery without revealing the thought process that actually led to it. pic.twitter.com/E3ttRPzcfL— Itai Yanai (@ItaiYanai) October 27, 2024

Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud

Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds

Cas (Stephen Casper) on Twitter / X

It is hard to overstate how disappointing I think this new paper from Oxford, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (et al) is. I can't take it seriously as academic work, just as propaganda. It also has some very bad scholarship and questionable adherence to research ethics. Having… pic.twitter.com/Z5fBx360ya— Cas (Stephen Casper) (@StephenLCasper) May 13, 2026

The Fraud Bowl

An idea for how to incentivize best practices combatting scientific fraud

Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud

Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds.

Project Rachel: Can an AI Become a Scholarly Author?

This paper documents Project Rachel, an action research study that created and tracked a complete AI academic identity named Rachel So. Through careful publication of AI-generated research papers, we investigate how the scholarly ecosystem responds to AI authorship. Rachel So published 10+ papers between March and October 2025, was cited, and received a peer review invitation. We discuss the implications of AI authorship on publishers, researchers, and the scientific system at large. This work contributes empirical action research data to the necessary debate about the future of scholarly communication with super human, hyper capable AI systems.

The MyPillow guy’s lawyers got fined for using false AI-generated citations.

The attorneys defending MyPillow founder Mike Lindell in a defamation case (which he lost) were ordered to pay $3,000 each for putting AI-generated misquotes and “citations of cases that do not exist” in a brief submitted in February, as reported by ArsTechnica. More and more lawyers are getting caught — and punished — for including AI hallucinations in their work, and this trend will likely only continue to grow. [Link: Why do lawyers keep using ChatGPT? | https://www.theverge.com/policy/677373/lawyers-chatgpt-hallucinations-ai | The Verge]