Paper Mills Flood Scientific Literature With Fakes

Researchers, publishers, and conference organizers report a surge in AI-generated fraudulent manuscripts, phantom citations, and fabricated images since ChatGPT's release and earlier this month. Experts and companies like Clear Skies and Cambridge University Press say paper mills and LLMs are producing plausible-looking fraud that is slipping through peer review and preprint servers, prompting calls for automated detection, intelligence-sharing, and stricter verification.