The AI ‘Ghosts’ Contaminating Academic Publishing
Samsung and University of Warsaw researchers find LLMs repeatedly generate the same fake author names, contaminating academic records with 1,655 ghost-authored DOIs.
A preprint from Samsung and the University of Warsaw, "The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing," shows that LLMs such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini repeatedly generate the same fictional names like Elena Vasquez, Marcus Chen, and Aris Thorne as experts and co-authors. Researchers identified 1,655 ghost-authored records on CERN-operated Zenodo carrying real DataCite DOIs, fabricated journals, and backdated publication dates. Ghost names also form synthetic research groups on ResearchGate and are indexed without verification by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar. The researchers suggest correlated name priors could serve as provenance signals for detecting AI-generated content.
- LLMs produce "correlated character ensembles," consistently pairing the same fabricated names
- 1,655 ghost-authored Zenodo records carry real DOIs and fabricated publication dates
- Ghost names indexed by Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and ResearchGate without verification
- Elena Vasquez linked to Claude Sonnet 4 output, suggesting model-provenance detection
- Retraining on AI-contaminated web content may erode this detection signal over time
- Vendors
- Samsung
- Products
- Zenodo
- AI models
- Claude Sonnet 4ChatGPTGemini
From the original article
3 min read at 404media.co
“Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived,” a new preprint research paper from Samsung and the University of Warsaw said.
By Emanuel Maiberg · 404media.co
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