No, the OP is right in this case. Did you read TFA? It was "peer reviewed".

> Worryingly, each of these submissions has already been reviewed by 3-5 peer experts, most of whom missed the fake citation(s). This failure suggests that some of these papers might have been accepted by ICLR without any intervention. Some had average ratings of 8/10, meaning they would almost certainly have been published.

If the peer reviewers can't be bothered to do the basics, then there is literally no point to peer review, which is fully independent of the author who uses or doesn't use AI tools.

Peer reviewers can also use AI tools, which will hallucinate a "this seems fine" response.

If AI fraud is good at avoiding detection via peer review that doesn’t mean peer review is useless.

If your unit tests don’t catch all errors it doesn’t mean unit tests are useless.