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.
The scientific community needs to gather and reach a consensus where AI is banned from writing their papers. (Yes, even for translation)
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
Super interesting. But also, super boring.
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No, they were not. AI was probably used for translation.
