# Ghost authors: When AI writes, submits, and even signs its own papers

**URL:** <https://forum.edch.eu/t/ghost-authors-when-ai-writes-submits-and-even-signs-its-own-papers/1174>\
**Category:** Reading Corner\
**Tags:** ai\
**Created:** [12 October 2026 07:33 UTC](https://forum.edch.eu/t/ghost-authors-when-ai-writes-submits-and-even-signs-its-own-papers/1174 "2026-10-12T07:33:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mpaulhac](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex005/user_avatar/forum.edch.eu/mpaulhac/32/48_2.png) [@mpaulhac](https://forum.edch.eu/u/mpaulhac)\
**Post date:** [12 October 2026 07:33 UTC](https://forum.edch.eu/t/ghost-authors-when-ai-writes-submits-and-even-signs-its-own-papers/1174/1 "2026-10-12T07:33:56Z")

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Hey everyone, I just got back from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and I had a really interesting chat with people from the Association for Computing Machinery about AI. They told me that one of their journals had received an article that was written _and_ submitted by an AI, with no human involved. They honestly don’t know whether someone told the AI to submit it or whether it did so on its own (crazy story)

This morning I was going through my emails, and the latest [Grand Labo](https://www.grandlabo.com/#editions-newsletter) newsletter (a French media outlet) happened to be about fake authors. Funny timing. It turns out you can now find academic authors on Zenodo who never existed: they were generated by AI, and their work has actually been published.

The newsletter shares some interesting pieces, if you want to dig in:

- _The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing_: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.02184](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.02184)
- Nature’s piece on it (paywalled, sorry): [Elena, Aris, Marcus: AI-generated ‘ghosts’ are polluting the scientific literature | Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02991-7)

Curious what you make of this!
