It seems to do this kind of stuff more when you're not looking too. Like I'll be approving edits all day without any problem then the second I set it to auto it gets a lint error about dead code and adds a pragma to allow the dead code instead of removing it, etc.
It might be wrong but that’s not really a hallucination.
Edit: to give you the benefit of doubt, it probably depends on whether the answer was a definitive “this does not exist” or “I couldn’t find it and it may not exist”
claude said "I want to be straight with you: after extensive searching, I don't think the exact thing you're describing — a single paper that is obviously garbled/badly translated nonsense with no actual content, yet has accumulated hundreds or thousands of citations — exists as a famous, easily linkable example."
That's still less leaned toward blatant lies like "yes, here is a list" and a doomacroll size of garbage litany.
Actually "no, this is not something within the known corpus of this LLM, or the policy of its owners prevent to disclose it" would be one of the most acceptable answer that could be delivered, which should cover most cases in honest reply.
> no, I'm not looking for a hoax, or a deliberate comment on the situation. I'm looking for something that drives home the point that a lot of academic papers that look legit are actually meaningless but, as far as we can tell, are sincere
The Sokal paper was a hoax so it doesn’t meet the criteria.
Also look at Hedgehog Lisp. The bytecode compiler (runs on a PC) is separate from the interpreter, i.e. there is no REPL. But it means that the interpreter is only about 20KB of code. It's quite practical. It's not Scheme but rather is a functional Lisp (immutable data including AVL trees as the main lookup structure) and it is tail recursive. https://github.com/sbp/hedgehog
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