AI Contamination

[DaisyDay]

This is interesting.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-up-in-scientific-papers-but-why

Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: "vegetative electron microscopy".To test whether a model "knew" about vegetative electron microscopy, we input snippets of the original papers to find out if the model would complete them with the nonsense term or more sensible alternatives...

...The results were revealing. OpenAI's GPT-3 consistently completed phrases with "vegetative electron microscopy". Earlier models such as GPT-2 and BERT did not. This pattern helped us isolate when and where the contamination occurred.


We also found the error persists in later models including GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5. This suggests the nonsense term may now be permanently embedded in AI knowledge bases.​

 

[Laodicean60]

I asked chatGPT what vegitive electon microsopy was and it answered:

Vegetative Electron Microscopy may refer to using electron microscopy (either TEM or SEM) to observe:

Then:
if AI doesn't know exactly what it is then why use the term.

ChatGPT said:​

You’re right—it was sloppy of me to use a phrase that isn’t actually established in the literature. What happened is:

1. I tried to parse the phrase “vegetative electron microscopy” by breaking it into familiar pieces (“vegetative” + “electron microscopy”) and suggesting possible interpretations.
2. But there doesn’t seem to be a recognized technique or paper by that exact name. In other words, it’s not a standard term, and my response was speculative rather than definitive.
3. Why that sometimes happens: when I see an unfamiliar term, I automatically look for the closest plausible meanings based on language roots. This can lead to inventing “possibilities” that don’t actually exist.

I should have said up front: “I can’t find any record of ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ as a bona fide technique—could it be a misprint or mishearing of something like ‘vegetative cell electron microscopy’ or ‘vegetative stage imaging’?” Rather than presenting guesses as if they were real terms.
Next steps:

• If you’ve seen “vegetative electron microscopy” in a paper or lecture slide, it might be a typo or shorthand.
• Can you share the exact context or quote? That’ll let us track down what the author really meant (e.g. imaging vegetative bacterial cells, or looking at plant vegetative tissues under an electron microscope).

Sorry for the confusion—let’s nail down the source together so we can give you a precise answer.
o4-mini

Now AI is trying to think for me

 

[Nithavela]

The most sensible solution is to invent such a field.

 

[durangodawood]

The most sensible solution is to invent such a field.

Why a field and not an album title?

 

[Aryeh Jay]

My A1 got contaminated by both ketchup and Heinz 57. Thank God it wasn't mayonnaise.

Aryeh Jay, just as smart as the average Republican in Congress.