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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)
Super interesting. But also, super boring.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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The phrase is "vegetative electron microscopy"
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.
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
The scientific community needs to gather and reach a consensus where AI is banned from writing their papers. (Yes, even for translation)
The lede is buried deep in this one. Yeah, these dumb LLMs got bad training data that persists to this day, but more concerning is the fact that some scientists are relying upon LLMs to write their papers. This is literally the way scientists communicate their findings to other scientists, lawmakers, and the public, and they're using fucking predictive text like it has cognition and knows anything.
Sure, most (all?) of those papers got retracted, but those are just the ones that got caught. How many more are lurking out there with garbage claims fabricated by a chatbot?
Thankfully, science will inevitably sus those papers out eventually, as it always does, but it's shameful that any scientist would be so fatuous to put out a paper written by a dumb bot. You're the experts. Write your own goddamn papers.
In some cases, it’s people who’ve done the research and written the paper who then use an LLM to give it a final polish. Often, it’s people who are writing in a non-native language.
Doesn’t make it good or right, but adds some context.
Adding extra polish like nonsense phrases. Nobody is supervising it then.
Sure, and I'm sympathetic to the baffling difficulties of English, but use Google Translate and ask someone who's more fluent for help with the final polish (as a single suggestion). Trusting your work, trusting science to an LLM is lunacy.
Google translate is using the same approach like an LLM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_machine_translation
So is DeepL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator
And before they were using neural network approaches they used statistical approaches, which are subject to the same errors as a result of bad training data.
Check the results though. Google translate is far far better at translation than a generic LLM.
It might be hard for them to find someone who is both fluent in english AND knows the field well enough to know vegetative electron microscopy is not a thing. Most universities have one general translation help service and science has a lot of field-specific weird terms.
That's why he said start with Google Translate. Because Google Translate isn't giving gibberish like vegetative electron microscopy.
oh yea,not to mention alot of papers tend to be low quality before the AI was used, ive been hearing people are writing dozens of papers just to fluff up thier resume/cv. it was quanitity over quality. i was in an presentation where the guy presenting thier research wrote 40+ papers just to get hired a university somewhere.
They were translating them not actually writing them like obviously it should have been caught by reviewers but that’s not nearly as bad
Translating them...otherwise know as rewriting the whole paper.
There is a huge difference between asking a LLM “ translate the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” and “ write a sentence about a fox and a dog” when you ask it to translate you can get weird translation issues like we saw here but you also get those sometimes with google translate but it shouldn’t change the actual content of the paper
Have you asked an LLM to translate anything bigger than a few sentences? It doesn't have enough contextual storage to keep a whole paper "in mind" and soon wanders off into nonsense.
Google translate is a different beast.
Thankfully, science will inevitably sus those papers out eventually, as it always does,
In the future, all search engines will have an option to ignore any results from 2022-20xx, the era of AI slop.
Its the immediate takeaway i made from the headline, so i dont feel like its buried deep
It's not mentioned at all in the article, so what you inferred from the headline is not what the author conveyed.
Ah, i admit i didnt read it, because the headline and the implication of AI being an issue in academia wasnt exactly news to me.
Don't use fucking AI to write scientific papers and the problem is solved. Wtf.
More salient takeaway is, don't use a LLM to translate a scientific paper. Because it can't translate a scientific paper. It can only rewrite the entire paper, in a different language. And it will introduce misunderstandings and hallucinations.
GIGO overcomes all
Let’s delve into the issue
So, all those research papers were written by AI? Huh.
No, they were not. AI was probably used for translation.
Translating is the process of rewriting the paper in another language. The paper has been written (in English) by an LLM.
That's not the same as just letting an LLM to halucinate a whole article from nothing - which it sounds like when you say it was written by AI. LLMs are not a bad tool for translations, they have to be checked well though. Working with a language is the one thing they can actually do - unlike giving real answers.