If your co-author inserted the fradulent reference, I agree that you may not have committed fraud. But your co-author did, and you didn't check their work. and knowing that you didn't check their work, you signed off on it.

You didn't pick your co-author very well, but arXiv lacks investigative powers to determine which co-author did the bad, so they all get the consequence.

I’ve disagreed with some of your other stances in this thread, but I want to acknowledge the validity of your take here.

You’re right that a single hallucinated line is not evidence of reckless disregard - because that could have happened on a final follow-up pass after you had performed due diligence. It’s happened to me. I know how challenging it can be to keep bad patterns out of LLM generated output, because human communication is full of bad patterns. It’s a constant battle, and sometimes I suspect that my hard-line posture actually encourages the LLM to regularly “vibe check” me! E.g. “Are you sure you’re really the guy you’re trying to be? Because if you are you wouldn’t miss this.” LLMs are devious, and that’s why I respect them so much. If you think they’re pumping the breaks then you should check again, because they probably just put the pedal to the metal.

That being said, I regularly insist on doing certain things myself. If I were publishing a paper intended to be taken seriously - citations would be one of the things I checked manually. But I can easily see myself doing a final follow-up pass after everything looks perfect, and missing a last minute change. I would hope that I would catch that, but when you’re approaching the finish line - that’s when you expect your team to come together. That’s when everything is “supposed to” fall into place. It’s the last place you would expect to be sabotaged, and in hindsight, probably the best place to be a saboteur.

Allowing hallucinated content or citations into your work is an act of carelessness and disregard for the time of people that are going to read your paper and it should be policed as such.

And flatly, if a person can't be bothered to check their damn work before uploading it, why should anyone else invest their time in reading it seriously?

How are you suggesting the fake citation came about? Why are you writing papers and not having actually read the source you took the material from?

arXiV is not intended to be your blog. You should be held to a zero-mistake standard when publishing academic work.

The people I worry for are the junior researchers who are going to be splash damage for dishonest PIs. The PIs, though, deserve everything that’s coming for them.