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I’m working in the area of adversarial examples against neural networks. A standard research paper generally starts off an introduction with something along the lines of the below, but probably with a bit more guff:

Neural networks are increasingly used in safety and security critical applications, such as medical image recognition or facial recognition in surveillance footage. However, the networks are vulnerable to malicious attacks through the manipulation of input data. With adversarial examples...... etc.

Considering there are hundreds of papers which start with the same introduction, would it be acceptable to skip over writing my own guff? Possibly just reference existing papers and mention “existing uses and problems” (or something like that).

The scene has already been set by hundreds of existing papers, so why would I need to set the scene again in any of the papers that I create?

Or would something like this generally fail to pass peer review? Obviously there’s many different criteria for different journals/confs etc.

Your introduction should depend on the journal/conference you are submitting to as that will help define your audience. If you are submitting to "The Journal of Adversarial Examples for Neural Networks", you can probably skip over a lot of the general intro material and assume that someone reading this journal should be familiar with the common challenges you are working on here. For that type of journal, your intro should focus more on the specific limitations of prior research that your work seeks to overcome. Generally these introductions actually end up longer and/or also include a "related works" section to allow you to key in on where your work really stands out.

On the other hand, if you are submitting to a more general interest journal like "Science" or "Nature", you need to do a lot more work covering the basics and usually in a very short space. For these types of journals, the "guff" may actually be valuable information as the readers may not even be aware your field existed before reading your paper. The challenge is getting everyone up to speed in the 200 words or so they give you to talk about it.

Most journals you will be submitting to will be somewhere in between. The general rule of thumb I use is to include in your intro everything your reader would need to know that they wouldn't also need to know for every single other paper in the journal. Even if 10% of the papers submitted to that journal are in your field, that means that 90% of the readers may not be working in that area, so you should at least give enough of an intro to your field to remind them of the things they need to know to understand your paper. That doesn't mean rambling for paragraphs, just enough to set up the more nuanced points so they don't miss the importance of your work.

You need to include the introduction to your paper because it might be the first paper in that field the reader is about to read.

Your work should be standalone and not rely on the assumption that the reader is familiar with the problem setup and motivation. If you’d like you can slightly shorten the spiel and reference an overview article/several notable papers that cover this. The setup is important because
1. Not everyone reading your paper is guaranteed to know the field
2. Even if they are this gives them some framework as to what they’ll be reading about today.

I somehow disagree with the other answers: I am of the same belief that too much of papers or memoirs are inflated with useless information. They are not curriculum books.

The introduction of my PhD thesis was just a few lines more or less stating that if you need an introduction to the problem then you should probably not read the thesis, or have a look at book A and book B before reading.

This was absolutely not intended to show what a genius I am and how uninformed you, the lowly reader, are, but rather to filter out people who will lose their time reading my thesis and expecting some kind of introduction to thermodynamics. I made sure to explain this in these few lines.

This was a thesis and not a paper, but my published papers where similar: the introduction was even shorter.

Begin every paper with a few words that the reader will immediately accept as uncontroversial to tell the reader what you are on about: 'The Situation'. eg 'Newton showed that gravitation was a universal force governed by an inverse square law'. Very soon after that, preferably the next sentence, state something that complicates the Situation: eg 'Recent experimental results cast doubt on Newton's theory'. You have now raised in the mind of the reader a Question: state it eg 'Was Newton wrong?'. Immediately state your Answer it. eg 'In this paper we show blah blah blah'.

If the reader has got that far, and it is only a few sentences, they will either want to know why you think that your Answer is correct or they will have realised that they are not interested in your paper at all.

That structure: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer enables you to tell your story in a way that will engage the reader throughout.

If it is not already clear from what I have said above, my answer to your question is that you do have to set the scene - that is what the Situation and Complication do, but you write them in a way that sets the scene for your work that you go on to describe, namely your Question, your Answer to that Questions and your reasons for giving that Answer.

If you plunge in then why would anyone want to read your paper? You have to tell them quickly whether the paper is for them. We all have huge numbers of papers that might possibly be relevant to our work. The reader needs to know really quickly whether yours is worth the trouble of reading.

If you say, 'Ah, but that is what the abstract does', then by all means write an abstract on the lines I suggest. If you do that you will question whether you need a section of your paper entitled "Introduction", you could move into more details of the Question (such as previous work on it) and your Answer.