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Hallucinating citations is “generating bullshit” in the purest sense.
by LPisGood 5mo ago
Hallucinating citations is “generating bullshit” in the purest sense.
- DiogenesKynikos 5mo agoLike humans, LLMs sometimes bullshit. That doesn't mean it's in any way reasonable to dismiss LLMs in general as "bullshit generators."
- LPisGood 5mo agoMaybe, maybe not, but clearly using them to generate bullshit citations is acting with disregard for the truth.
- DiogenesKynikos 5mo agoDepends on how exactly it happened. If the author just wanted to add a citation to some canonical paper (like "Attention is all you need") at the last minute, used LLM autocomplete to do it, and didn't carefully check that the citation was correct, then a year-long ban is a massive overreaction. A careless miscitation is not on the same level as something like data manipulation. In general, I think everyone needs to be practical about what the actual risks are of LLM use. Are we worried about true nonsense flooding the arXiv? Or are we worried about tracking authorship when LLMs are involved? What's the actual concern?