ArXiv Will Ban You for Hallucinated References

Thomas Dietterich, Chair of the Computer Science section of the preprint server arXiv.org, recently clarified the site’s policies towards “hallucinated” citations and other signs of careless use of AI in a post on X. If your paper contains a citation to a paper that doesn’t actually exist, or has other signs you didn’t read it before posting like leftover commentary (the example he gave was “here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?”), then you can get banned from the arXiv for one year. Even after that year you’d be on a kind of “probation”, and would need to show that your next few papers had been accepted by peer-reviewed journals first before posting them. At the risk of saying the obvious, this is a good idea! arXiv isn’t peer review, it isn’t meant to judge the value of the papers it hosts. But it still needs to be a useful place for scientists to post their papers, which is why they try to keep spam and irrelevant content to a minimum. If you don’t…