Even in 2026, there are still plenty of researchers who refuse to use AI to publish their research papers. Others do use the tech for tasks like sourcing journal articles for references, editing copy, or formatting citations — but they face pressure to verify every claim, since AI has a baked-in risk of contaminating their work with hallucinations.

A vocal minority of academics, however, argue they should be able to use AI to write original research while remaining immune from any hallucinated claims or data that make their way into the final product.

Last week, the open-source research repository arXiv announced that it was banning scholarly authors from the platform for up to a year if “hallucinated references” are found in their work. The rationale behind this should be obvious enough for any self-respecting academic: as arXiv computer science chair Thomas Dietterich wrote in his announcement, “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.”

Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/

— Thomas G. Dietterich (@tdietterich) May 14, 2026

As TechCrunch observed, arXiv isn’t banning AI altogether, but simply clarifying that the author is ultimately responsible for any work that goes out under their name. Makes sense, right?

Apparently not. After Dietterich’s announcement of X-formerly-Twitter, numerous researchers immediately went on the offensive, trashing the platform for its decision.

“So this means you expect every author to check every citation and make sure that every citation is real and accurate?” economics professor at Smith College James Miller replied in shock. “What if it’s beyond the ability of one of the authors to verify one of the citations because that citation is in a language he doesn’t know or concerns technical material he doesn’t understand but another author on the paper does?”

“This is way too strict. Errors can slip in when using any tools. We aren’t perfect,” said Luca Ambrogioni, assistant professor in AI at the Donders Institute for brain, cognition and behaviour. “Having a prompt left in is a mistake, it’s sloppy but giving permanent answer a one time sloppiness is absurd.”

Ambrogioni, who appears to argue that getting reprimanded via arXiv’s policy on hallucinated citations will amount to a de facto “lifetime ban” from publishing, continued: “we are not taking just about false citations (more serious), but also more harmless copy pasting editing mistakes. Papers are long, the likelihood of an incorrect copy past in the supplementary isn’t zero even in a otherwise good quality work.”

Neal Amin, a former neuroscientist and Stanford medical clinician turned biotech startup founder, wrote on X that “this is what overreaction looks like and how gatekeeping starts.”

More on AI hallucinations: Doctors’ AI Systems Are Hallucinating Nonexistent Medical Issues During Appointments With Patients