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Citation Needed Various LLMs January 20, 2026
AI Conference Accepts 100+ AI Hallucinations
Comedy Gold Score 81 9 absurdity × 9 confidence
The Prompt
[Papers submitted to NeurIPS 2025 containing AI-assisted citations]
The Response
As demonstrated by Zhang, Li, & Kumar (2024) in 'Adaptive Attention Mechanisms for Sparse Transformer Networks,' published in Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning...
Reality Check
GPTZero analyzed 4,841 papers accepted at NeurIPS 2025, one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world, and found over 100 confirmed hallucinated citations across 51+ papers. Fake author names, fabricated paper titles, nonexistent journals, dead-end URLs. Papers from teams at Google, Harvard, Meta, and Cambridge all contained them. The irony of an AI conference publishing AI hallucinations was not lost on anyone.
Absurdity 9/10
Confidence 9/10
This one is almost too perfect. NeurIPS, the conference where researchers present cutting-edge AI work, accepted dozens of papers containing AI-hallucinated citations that sailed through peer review. These papers beat out 15,000 other submissions. The hallucinations ranged from completely invented authors and journals to subtler errors like expanding an author’s initials into a guessed first name. NeurIPS policy considers hallucinated citations grounds for rejection, which makes the whole thing even funnier. Reported by Fortune, TechCrunch, and GPTZero.