Vibe Citing: The Hallucination Crisis at NeurIPS 2025

Recent investigations by GPTZero uncovered over 100 fabricated citations in research papers accepted for the NeurIPS 2025 conference. These "hallucinations," or vibe citations, often include fake author names like "John Doe" and non-existent paper titles that mimic legitimate academic formatting. This discovery highlights a growing reproducibility crisis fueled by a massive surge in AI-assisted submissions that has overwhelmed the peer review pipeline. While some scholars view these errors as minor technical glitches, others argue they signal academic misconduct and a fundamental breakdown in research integrity. Experts suggest that as volume increases, institutions must adopt automated verification tools to distinguish between human error and generative "slop." Ultimately, the presence of these fabrications forces a reckoning regarding the incentives for publication and the reliability of modern scientific discourse.