ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop

ArXiv says it will ban authors for one year if they submit papers containing AI-generated slop, such as hallucinated citations, placeholder text, or chatbot meta-comments left in the manuscript. "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)," said Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, on X. "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." 404 Media reports: 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. Dietterich told [404 Media] in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule -- meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned -- but that decisions will be open to appeal. "I want to emphasize that we only apply this to cases of incontrovertible evidence," he said. "I should also add that our internal process requires first a moderator to document the problem and then for the Section Chair to confirm before imposing the penalty."

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