Ban on Authors Who Submit AI Content "Welcome but Unenforceable"

arXiv will impose an immediate one-year ban if submissions contain incontrovertible evidence of inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content produced by large language models. The policy applies when authors did not check results of LLM generation, making the paper’s content untrustworthy. Examples include hallucinated references and meta-comments left in the manuscript, such as prompts or instructions to fill in data. The ban will be followed by a requirement that later arXiv submissions be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue. The move aims to curb increasing AI-assisted submissions, which have grown rapidly across mathematics, physics, and computing.

"arXiv has said it will impose an immediate one-year ban if it finds "incontrovertible evidence" that submissions contain "inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content" written by large language models."

""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," explained Thomas Dietterich, who chairs arXiv's computing section, as he announced the policy on the social media platform X."

"Examples of incontrovertible evidence would include "hallucinated references" and "meta-comments from the LLM," continued Dietterich, who gave examples of a researcher failing to delete phrases such as "here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?" or "the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments.""

"The one-year ban from arXiv will be "followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue," said Dietterich, an emeritus professor at Oregon State University whose research focuses on machine learning and AI."

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