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A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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And it looks more like a machine translation error than anything else. Per the article, there was a dataset with two instances of the phrase being created from bad OCR. Then, more recently, somehow the bad phrase got associated with a typo: in Farsi, the words "scanning" and "vegetative" are extremely similar. Thus, when some Iranian authors wanted to translate their paper to English, they used an LLM, and it decided that since "vegetative electron microscope" was apparently a valid term (since it was included in its training data), that's what they meant.
It's not that the entire papers were being invented from nothing by Chatgpt.
Yes it is. The papers are the product of an LLM. Even if the user only thought it was translating, the translation hasn't been reviewed and has errors. The causal link between what goes in to an LLM and what comes out is not certain, so if nobody is checking the output it could just be a technical sounding lorem ipsum generator.
That's an accurate name for the new toy, but not as fancy as "ai", i guess. Because we know that anything that comes out is gibberish made up to look like something intelligent.
It's been found in many papers though. Do they all have such excuses?
From the article, it sounds like they were all from Iran, so yes.
It probably is decently common to translate articles using ChatGPT as it is a large language model so that does seem likely