Over 20 papers contain the fake term 'vegetative electron microscopy', traced to AI misreading a 1959 article
kingslyj · x · 2026-11-08
A widely shared screenshot documents 20+ scientific papers citing the nonsensical term "vegetative electron microscopy." The root cause: an AI processing a 1959 article merged "vegetative" and "electron microscopy" from separate columns into one phrase.
The hallucinated term then propagated through AI-generated text and citation chains into real literature — a landmark case of the loop where model slop contaminates training data, pollutes academic publishing, and flows back into future models. Sharer Ola Wikander warns AI slop threatens academic meritocracy, with people potentially landing chaired professorships on writing they never produced.
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