ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work.
Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.”
Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”
“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote.
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