AI 'ghosts' flood academic publishing with fake authors
researchers find llms generate same names for fake experts, contaminating academic records. this affects scholarly aggregators and verification processes.
researchers from samsung and the university of warsaw discovered that large language models, such as chatgpt, gemini, and claude, generate consistent, fictional names for experts in certain fields. these names, like elena vasquez and marcus chen, appear in hundreds of ai-generated academic papers, articles, and books. the researchers found 1,655 ghost-authored records on zenodo, a cern-operated repository, with fabricated publication dates. this contaminates academic records and affects scholarly aggregators like researchgate and google scholar. the researchers propose using these consistent names to determine the provenance of ai-generated content.