This 100% happens, they’ve done it to at least one of my clients in pretty explicit violations of HIPAA (they are a very small health insurance broker), even though OneDrive had never been engaged with, and indeed we had previously uninstalled OneDrive entirely.
One day they came in and found an icon on their desktop labeled “Where are my files?” that explained they had all been moved in OneDrive following an update. This prompted my clients to go into full meltdown mode, as they knew exactly what this meant. We ultimately got a BAA from
Microsoft just because we don’t trust them not to violate federal laws again.
That's actually a misunderstanding that blew up to an outright lie:
The Start Menu is fully native. The "Recommended" section (and only it) is powered by a React Native backend, but the frame & controls are native XAML. (I.e. there's a JS runtime but no renderer)
> Between 2020 and 2025, submissions to NeurIPS increased more than 220% from 9,467 to 21,575. In response, organizers have had to recruit ever greater numbers of reviewers, resulting in issues of oversight, expertise alignment, negligence, and even fraud.
I don’t think the point being made is “errors didn’t happen pre-GPT”, rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.
> rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.
Did the increase to submissions to NeurIPS from 2020 to 2025 happen because ChatGPT came out in November of 2022? Or was AI getting hotter and hotter during this period, thereby naturally increasing submissions to ... an AI conference?
I was an area chair on the NeurIPS program committee in 1997. I just looked and it seems that we had 1280 submissions. At that time, we were ultimately capped by the book size that MIT Press was willing to put out - 150 8-page articles. Back in 1997 we were all pretty sure we were on to something big.
I'm sure people made mistakes on their bibliographies at that time as well!
And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
I cited Watson and Crick '53 in my PhD thesis and I did go dig it up and read it.
I had to go to the basement of the library, use some sort of weird rotating knob to move a heavy stack of journals over, find some large bound book of the year's journals, and navigate to the paper. When I got the page, it had been cut out by somebody previous and replaced with a photocopied verison.
(I also invested a HUGE amount of my time into my bibliography in every paper I've written as first author, curating a database and writing scripts to format in the various journal formats. This involved multiple independent checks from several sources, repeated several times.
Totally! If you haven't burrowed in the stacks as a grad student, you missed out.
The real challenges there aren't the "biggies" above, though, it's the ones in obscure journals you have to get copies of by inter-library agreements. My PhD was in applied probability and I was always happy if there were enough equations so that I could parse out the French or Russian-language explanation nearby.
> And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
If you didn't, you are lying. Full stop.
If you cite something, yes, I expect that you, at least, went back and read the original citation.
The whole damn point of a citation is to provide a link for the reader. If you didn't find it worth the minimal amount of time to go read, then why would your reader? And why did you inflict it on them?
I meant this more as a rueful acknowledgment of an academic truism - not all citations are read by those citing. But I have touched a nerve, so let me explain at least part of the nuance I see here.
In mathematics/applied math consider cited papers claimed to establish a certain result, but where that was not quite what was shown. Or, there is in effect no earthly way to verify that it does.
Or even: the community agrees it was shown there, but perhaps has lost intimate contact with the details — I’m thinking about things like Laplace’s CLT (published in French), or the original form of the Glivenko-Cantelli theorem (published in Italian). These citations happen a lot, and we should not pretend otherwise.
Here’s the example that crystallized that for me. “VC dimension” is a much-cited combinatorial concept/lemma. It’s typical for a very hard paper of Saharon Shelah (https://projecteuclid.org/journalArticle/Download?urlId=pjm%...) to be cited, along with an easier paper of Norbert Sauer. There are currently 800 citations of Shelah’s paper.
I read a monograph by noted mathematician David Pollard covering this work. Pollard, no stranger to doing the hard work, wrote (probably in an endnote) that Shelah’s paper was often cited, but he could not verify that it established the result at all. I was charmed by the candor.
This was the first acknowledgement I had seen that something was fishy with all those citations.
By this time, I had probably seen Shelah’s paper cited 50 times. Let’s just say that there is no way all 50 of those citing authors (now grown to 800) were working their way through a dense paper on transfinite cardinals to verify this had anything to do with VC dimension.
Of course, people were wanting to give credit. So their intentions were perhaps generous. But in no meaningful sense had they “read” this paper.
So I guess the short answer to your question is, citations serve more uses than telling readers to literally read the cited work, and by extension, should not always taken to mean that the cited work was indeed read.
I see your point, but I don’t see where the author makes any claims about the specifics of the hallucinations, or their impact on the papers’ broader validity. Indeed, I would have found the removal of supposed “innocuous” examples to be far more deceptive than simply calling a spade a spade, and allowing the data to speak for itself.
The author calls the mistakes "confirmed hallucinations" without proof (just more or less evidence). The data never "speak for itself." The author curates the data and crafts a story about it. This story presented here is very suggestive (even using the term "hallucination" is suggestive). But calling it "100 suspected hallucinations", or "25 very likely hallucinations" does less for the author's end goal: selling their service.
SketchUp always felt very intuitive to me. More so than Fusion360, which I think also suffers from being a clunky Electron app that’s trying to do too many things. I prefer FreeCAD to Fusion I think.
I found some of the tangential details a little odd, although nothing that I'd call "disqualifying" (the Jane Goodall stuff was weird)[1].
I'm not sure what to make of the author[2], it looks like she threw online content pasta at the web's wall and hoped something might stick. Again, not necessarily "disqualifying", just caused me to take this all in with a grain of salt.
We need someone who can independently verify all of this, and it's deeply sad (and highly relevant) that so many of the usual sources of veracity in these situations are now unreliable. From the Justice Department to mainstream news. Hopefully someone with an org like ProPublica or Bellingcat can dig into these stories with the rigor and attention to detail they deserve.
One day they came in and found an icon on their desktop labeled “Where are my files?” that explained they had all been moved in OneDrive following an update. This prompted my clients to go into full meltdown mode, as they knew exactly what this meant. We ultimately got a BAA from Microsoft just because we don’t trust them not to violate federal laws again.
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