@jtdc.bsky.social:
I, for one, am just shocked that a tool developed by Silicon Valley techbros would devalue women and prefer to invent men to take credit for their work! Shocked!
Just more evidence these tools are trash unfit for service.
Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social June 16, 2026:
When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently
1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures,
2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and
3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.
Interestingly, the models themselves offer pseudo-mathematical explanations for this effect, claiming that women authors are simply “less salient.”
When generating bibliographies, the models not only omit female authors or misattribute women’s work to male authors; they will also produce lists of works cited in which all work by men is attributed to its authors, while work by female scholars is simply left unattributed.
Here is work showing some of this effect. It is important, however, to see the form that this takes ‘in the wild’ in terms of the erasure of actual women-led scholarship in LLMs by multiple modalities, so I intend to run some bibliometrics myself and put the results out. arxiv.org/abs/2508.02740
Who Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference Selection
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted as research assistants, particularly for literature review and reference recommendation, yet little is known about whether they introduce demogra…arxiv.org
One of the other interesting effects I have noticed: when the omission of key female-authored scholarship is called out, the models then attribute the ‘outsized’ significance of that scholarship to a prominent male senior author—who doesn’t exist.
My paper on the free energy principle is so heavily cited, according to Claude, thanks to Andy Clark’s involvement. Clark is, evidently, the 4th and senior author on a single-authored paper.
What should we call this paper? “Hallelujah, it’s raining (hallucinated) men?”
