Description: Researchers reportedly traced the appearance of the nonsensical phrase "vegetative electron microscopy" in scientific papers to contamination in AI training data. Testing indicated that large language models such as GPT-3, GPT-4, and Claude 3.5 may reproduce the term. The error allegedly originated from a digitization mistake that merged unrelated words during scanning, and a later translation error between Farsi and English.
Editor Notes: Timeline notes: The phrase "vegetative electron microscopy" reportedly originated from a digitization error in 1950s scientific texts and was later reinforced by a translation mistake in papers published in 2017 and 2019. In 2025, researchers allegedly found that several large language models were reproducing the term, possibly due to training data contamination from Common Crawl.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: OpenAI and Anthropic developed an AI system deployed by OpenAI , Anthropic , Researchers and Scientific authors, which harmed Researchers , Scientific authors , Scientific publishers , Peer reviewers , Scholars , Readers of scientific publications , Scientific record and Academic integrity.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1044
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-04-15
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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 …
The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet "vegetative electron microscopy" had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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