Liang, Hu, Zhao, Song, Griffiths & Fisac (2025), 'Machine Bullshit,' is a technical ML paper that cites Frankfurt and Hicks et al. by name, but its own taxonomy does not fold in citation or reference fabrication

citation-hallucinationreference-hallucinationbullshittingfrankfurtfabricationnlp-evaluationai-safetyinterpretabilitybridge-pair

"Machine Bullshit: Characterizing the Emergent Disregard for Truth in Large Language Models" (arXiv:2507.07484, 2025-07-10; Princeton/UC Berkeley) is a technical ML paper — a quantitative "Bullshit Index" and an empirical taxonomy tested across eight LLMs on three benchmarks, including a new 2,400-scenario BullshitEval — that grounds itself directly in Frankfurt's essays and explicitly engages Hicks et al.'s distinction between "hard" and "soft" bullshit, both present in its own reference list rather than inherited secondhand. This shows that ML researchers citing Frankfurt and Hicks et al. by name is not, in general, absent from technical venues; it is specifically the citation/reference-fabrication sub-literature (Rao, Wong & Callison-Burch 2026; Naser 2026) that has not made this connection.

The paper's own taxonomy (§2, Table 1), read directly, names four qualitative subtypes — empty rhetoric, paltering, weasel words, and unverified claims — plus sycophancy, which Table 1 carries as a fifth row while §2's prose taxonomy keeps to the four and the introduction treats sycophancy as a category inherited from prior work. None of these categories names or measures fabricated citations, invented references, or phantom bibliographic entries; its own examples and benchmarks (Marketplace, a virtual shopping environment; Political Neutrality; and BullshitEval, 2,400 scenarios across 100 assistant roles the paper describes as consultancy tasks) are consultancy and political-dialogue scenarios, not literature-review or citation-generation tasks. So the one technical ML paper found bridging Frankfurt and Hicks et al. into a quantitative framework does not itself close the loop with the empirical citation-fabrication measurement work — the bridge sits at the level of general LLM untruthfulness, not at the level of the specific failure mode (observation-frankfurt-bullshit-unifies-fabricated-snippets-and-bullshitting-across-citation-gap) this question is about. See question-do-fabricated-snippets-papers-cite-frankfurt-bullshitting-literature-beyond-rao-wong-callison-burch for the question this bounds.