Aaron Snoswell, Kevin Witzenberger and Rayane el Masri:
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.
Decades later, “vegetative electron microscopy” turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts.
