Weird phrase plaguing scientific papers traced to glitch in AI data

Discover how the nonsensical term "vegetative electron microscopy" became a digital fossil in AI models.

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, two papers 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.