the reaction to the arXiv slop penalty is the gift
"So this means you expect every author to check every citation and make sure that every citation is real and accurate" GOOD LORD WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING IN THERE THEN
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@davidgerard You'd think people wouldn't be so upset. I thought the entire idea of a citation was, "I read this thing and am using their ideas in furtherance of my own." They aren't there as an appeal to authority. They actually serve a purpose.
@trashpanda look you'll be left behind with that sort of thinking
@davidgerard 鈥at? I mean, yes? I do expect paper authors to check all the references in their papers or trust sufficiently that the other authors will do so? Why would you coauthor a paper with someone you don鈥檛 trust to do rigorous science?
@wordshaper @davidgerard Former academic here (last saw the inside of a lab in 1999).
The arXiv ban on LLM-generated citations is not even as restrictive as some people are thinking.
The arXiv ban is on *hallucinated* citations. Ones that an LLM made up and which don't exist anywhere. It isn't based on whether the citation is relevant to the submission, or on whether every author in the author list read the cited work and understood it. It's only for things that can be checked fairly automatically...
...as you, a prospective or actual scientist, should be doing *anyway* as part of writing the fscking paper. Even if you don't understand the subfield that led your co-author to include Citation X, you can -- and should -- still either ask said co-author to show you the reference, or do a quick literature search to verify it exists.
@dpnash @wordshaper @davidgerard
I have been in situations where I contributed early and ended up as a co-author a significant time later after having to withdraw due to sustained illness, without further input into the final paper. My contribution was recognized, but I was not involved in the final draft. It's not reasonable for me to ask my co-authors to throw away their work or delay publication indefinitely because I can't review the citations list. I trust the people I worked with (after all, they agreed that I should continue to receive credit for my contribution). But things change, and trust can be misplaced.
It's not always reasonable to assume every person involved in writing a paper is going to have an equal opportunity to check it before submission.
There should be a process to let people fix mistakes before a blanket ban like this is applied. There should be recognition that different people contribute different things to a paper, and that the world is more complex than this simple rule assumes. There should be an appeals process.
And if the person reporting it is an author, the penalty applies to them as well. The incentive structure this establishes is entirely counterproductive.
@Robotistry @dpnash @wordshaper you're presently theorycrafting in a vacuum based on a headline. I urge you to write to the arXiv and ask them, rather than continue posting ex culo in my mentions.
