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.
It’s been found in many papers though. Do they all have such excuses?
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.
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_translationSo 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.
Don’t use fucking AI to write scientific papers and the problem is solved. Wtf.
The scientific community needs to gather and reach a consensus where AI is banned from writing their papers. (Yes, even for translation)
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.
