From the «AI is neither artificial nor intelligent» department:
Title: A Strange Phrase Keeps Turning Up in Scientific Papers, but Why?
Author: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 08:37:00 +0000
Link: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/05/03/0154209&from=rss

upstart[1] writes:

A Strange Phrase Keeps Turning Up in Scientific Papers, But Why?[2]:

Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term[3] appearing in published papers: "vegetative electron microscopy".

This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a "digital fossil" – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence[4] (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories.

Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem.

The case of vegetative electron microscopy offers a troubling glimpse into
how AI systems can perpetuate and amplify errors throughout our collective knowledge.

Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a
remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors.

First, two[5]papers[6] from the 1950s, published in the journal
Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised.

However, the digitising process erroneously combined "vegetative" from one column of text with "electron" from another. As a result, the phantom term
was created.

Decades later, "vegetative electron microscopy" turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017[7] and 2019[8], two papers used the term in
English captions and abstracts.

This appears to be due to a translation error[9]. In Farsi, the words for "vegetative" and "scanning" differ by only a single dot.

The upshot? As of today, "vegetative electron microscopy" appears in 22
papers, according to Google Scholar[10]. One was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal[11], and Elsevier issued a correction[12] for another.

The term also appears in news articles discussing subsequent integrity investigations[13].

Vegetative electron microscopy began to appear more frequently in the 2020s.
To find out why, we had to peer inside modern AI models – and do some archaeological digging through the vast layers of data they were trained on.

[...] Finding errors of this sort is not easy. Fixing them may be almost impossible.

Read more of this story[14] at SoylentNews.

Links:
[1]: https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/ (link)
[2]: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-up-in-scientific-papers-but-why (link)
[3]: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-microscopy-fingerprint-paper-mill/ (link)
[4]: https://www.sciencealert.com/artificial-intelligence (link)
[5]: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/br.20.4.207-242.1956 (link)
[6]: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/br.23.1.1-7.1959 (link)
[7]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=enas_sdt=0,5&q=Production+of+mesoporous+activated+carbon+from+cone+of+Iranian+pine+tree+(Pinus+eldarica)+using+chemical+activation+for+adsorption+of+sodium+dodecylbenzene+sulfonate+from+aqueous+solution&btnG= (
link)
[8]: https://web.p.ebscohost.com/abstract?site=ehostscope=site&jrnl=20085729&AN=141678734&h=e9Z0lqUsvh1WBhQvCayQkWtMqGcULLWTPrWyrZbI+QdCrwycHUHwP0UFo7hX3eLpPU1VEhqXgz4QHsTCrtBAFw==&crl=c&resultLocal=ErrCrlNoResults&resultNs=Ehost&crlhashurl=login.aspx?
direct=true&profile=ehost&scope=site&authtype=crawler&jrnl=20085729&AN=141678734 (link)
[9]: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/03/04/vegetative-electron-microscopy-phrase-farsi-typo/ (link)
[10]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=enas_sdt=0,5&q=vegetative+electron&btnG= (link)
[11]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-022-23253-9 (link)
[12]: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/17/12/2841 (link)
[13]: https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-04-02/one-of-the-worlds-most-cited-scientists-rafael-luque-suspended-without-pay-for-13-years.html (link)
[14]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/05/03/0154209&from=rss (link)

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