A Strange Phrase Keeps Turning Up in Scientific Papers, but Why?
upstart writes:
A Strange Phrase Keeps Turning Up in Scientific Papers, But Why?:
Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term 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 (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, twopapers 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 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts.
This appears to be due to a translation error. 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. One was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal, and Elsevier issued a correction for another.
The term also appears in news articles discussing subsequent integrity investigations.
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.
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