{"id":301390,"date":"2025-04-23T03:52:48","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T10:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sftarticles.wpenginepowered.com\/en\/?p=301390"},"modified":"2025-07-01T14:49:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T21:49:23","slug":"dozens-of-scientists-use-a-phrase-that-means-nothing-you-guessed-it-ai-is-to-blame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/dozens-of-scientists-use-a-phrase-that-means-nothing-you-guessed-it-ai-is-to-blame\/","title":{"rendered":"Dozens of scientists use a phrase that means nothing: you guessed it, AI is to blame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In the vast and ever-expanding world of scientific publishing,&nbsp;<strong>a bizarre phrase has infiltrated dozens of academic articles<\/strong>\u2014and artificial intelligence may be the culprit. The term &#8220;vegetative electron microscopy&#8221; has surfaced in at least 22 peer-reviewed papers, despite having&nbsp;<strong>no technical or scientific meaning whatsoever<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A cascade of errors from OCR to translation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The origins of this nonsensical phrase trace back to&nbsp;<strong>a 1959 article where \u201cvegetative\u201d and \u201celectron microscopy\u201d appeared in separate columns<\/strong>. Optical character recognition software (OCR), widely used to digitize old texts, appears to have mistakenly combined them. Another plausible cause lies in Persian-language translation, where \u201cscanning\u201d and \u201cvegetative\u201d differ by a single dot in writing,&nbsp;<strong>leading to systematic mistranslations<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">AI models perpetuate the nonsense<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Once the error entered the digital sphere, it didn\u2019t stop there.&nbsp;<strong>Language models like GPT-3 and Claude 3.5 trained on contaminated data<\/strong>&nbsp;absorbed the phrase as if it were legitimate. These models, unable to distinguish credible from flawed input without human oversight, now&nbsp;<strong>reproduce the phrase confidently in scientific-style outputs<\/strong>, compounding the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Editors and reviewers failed to intervene<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps the most troubling aspect is that&nbsp;<strong>major academic publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature validated these articles<\/strong>, either through negligence or indifference. In some cases, reviewers defended the phrase with implausible justifications, further embedding the error into the scientific canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A symptom of a deeper crisis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This isn\u2019t an isolated blunder. It highlights&nbsp;<strong>a wider crisis in scientific publishing<\/strong>, where paper mills, poor translation, and unchecked AI usage are eroding the integrity of research. The question remains:&nbsp;<strong>how many more errors like this are silently shaping our understanding of science?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the vast and ever-expanding world of scientific publishing,&nbsp;a bizarre phrase has infiltrated dozens of academic articles\u2014and artificial intelligence may be the culprit. The term &#8220;vegetative electron microscopy&#8221; has surfaced in at least 22 peer-reviewed papers, despite having&nbsp;no technical or scientific meaning whatsoever. A cascade of errors from OCR to translation The origins of this &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/dozens-of-scientists-use-a-phrase-that-means-nothing-you-guessed-it-ai-is-to-blame\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Dozens of scientists use a phrase that means nothing: you guessed it, AI is to blame&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9317,"featured_media":301391,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":0},"categories":[1015],"tags":[],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[],"class_list":["post-301390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307629,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301390\/revisions\/307629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301390"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=301390"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=301390"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=301390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}