LLMs flip a p-value into two conclusions

A new European Spine Journal editorial warns that LLMs can amplify confirmation bias, statistical “spin,” and fabricated citations in evidence workflows; it highlights a test where models often changed their conclusion when a p-value moved from 0.049 to 0.051. The authors also cite an audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers that found fabricated citations in nearly 3,000 publications. Research teams should keep source retrieval, statistical interpretation, and final claims under human review rather than treating a fluent summary as an evidence audit, a concern that complements the archive’s reproducibility gate for AI mathematics.