Posts about: digital fossil

A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data

A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data

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 […]…