Comment by fumi2026
18 hours ago
This feels less like scientific integrity and more like predatory marketing. I find this public "shame list" approach by GPTZero deeply unethical and technically suspect for several reasons:
1. Doxxing disguised as specific criticism: Publishing the names of authors and papers without prior private notification or independent verification is not how academic corrections work. It looks like a marketing stunt to generate buzz at the expense of researchers' reputations.
2. False Positives & Methodology: How does their tool distinguish between an actual AI "hallucination" and a simple human error (e.g., a typo in a year, a broken link, or a messy BibTeX entry)? Labeling human carelessness as "AI fabrication" is libelous.
3. The "Protection Racket" Vibe: The underlying message seems to be: "Buy our tool, or next time you might be on this list." It’s creating a problem (fear of public shaming) to sell the solution.
We should be extremely skeptical of a vendor using a prestigious conference as a billboard for their product by essentially publicly shaming participants without due process.
I think its great.
They explicitly distinguish between a "flawed citation" (missing author, typo in title) and a hallucination (completely fabricated journal, fake DOI, nonexistent authors). You can literally click through and verify each one yourself. If you think they're wrong about a specific example, point it out. It doesn't matter if these are honest mistakes or not - they should be highlighted and you should be happy to have a tool that can find them before you publish.
It's ridiculous to call it doxxing. The papers are already published at NeurIPS with author names attached. GPTZero isn't revealing anything that wasn't already public. They are pointing out what they think are hallucinations which everyone can judge for themselves.
It might even be terrible at detecting things. Which actually, I do not think is the case after reading the article. But even so, if they are unreliable I think the problem takes care of itself.
Don't expect ethics from GPTZero. If you upload a large document, they'll give a fake 100% AI rating behind a blur until you pay up to get the actual analysis. This clearly serves to prey on paranoid authors who are worried about being perceived as using AI.
Yeah, my first question was whether or not the hallucination checker can hallucinate.