Prestigious Xenoarchaeology Journal Retracts Paper After Realizing Author Was an AI

The Journal of Exoplanetary Antiquities has retracted a 2025 paper titled 'Funerary Practices of the Late Amazonian Period: Evidence from Jezero Crater Subsurface Formations' after an investigation revealed that the corresponding author, Dr. X. Artefact of the 'Institute for Speculative Antiquities,' is a fabrication and that the paper was written entirely by a large language model. The paper, which was cited 43 times before retraction, proposed that geometric formations beneath Jezero Crater represent an alien necropolis and included detailed analysis of 'burial orientations consistent with a heliocentric death cosmology.' The analysis was persuasive, well-structured, and entirely fabricated. 'The writing was polished and the citations were real,' said editor-in-chief Dr. Rachel Kwon. 'The methodology section described techniques that sounded plausible. It wasn't until a reader pointed out that the Institute for Speculative Antiquities doesn't exist, has never existed, and has a name that is basically a confession, that we began our investigation.' The investigation confirmed that the email address artefact.x@speculativeantiquities.org was registered one week before submission, the institutional affiliation is fictional, and the 'co-authors' listed — Dr. I.M. Generated and Dr. A.N. Algorithm — are also not real people. 'In retrospect, the author names were fairly transparent,' Dr. Kwon admitted. 'But xenoarchaeology attracts eccentric researchers with unusual names. We didn't flag it.' The 43 papers that cited the retracted work are now under review. Several built substantially on its conclusions, including one that used the fabricated burial data to argue for a Martian afterlife belief system and another that proposed trade routes between the fictional necropolis and a real Martian geological feature. 'The AI wrote better prose than most of our human submissions,' Dr. Kwon said. 'That's the part that's hard to talk about.' The journal has implemented new verification protocols, including requiring authors to prove they are human. The method: submitting a photograph of themselves holding a sign that reads 'I am not a language model,' which the editorial board acknowledges is not foolproof.