Tired of conventional electron microscopy? Vegans can now do miscoscopy safe in the knowledge that it is ethical. AI slush in science publications.
The ground breaking introduction of the technique dubbed Vegetative Electron Microscopy (VEM) was announced by a joint Iranian and Italian team in their 2023 paper. They do not explain what VEM is and how it differs from conventional Scanning or Tunneling Electron Microscopy. However it has become a popular technique. There are currently ten papers listed in Google Scholar that include the use of this technique. There used to be over twenty.
The phrase Vegetative Electron Microscopy is a nonsense phrase that is red light warning that a.scientific paper has been created by a poorly trained Large Language Model (LLM). In a neat bit of detective work Alexander Magazinov, a software engineer from Kazakhstan, came up with a plausible explanation of how the phrase Vegetative Electron Microscopy ended up in the LLM.
In a 1959 paper by RE Strange the phrase can be seen straddling the divide between the two columns of text. Magazinov has suggested that the LLM input reader just read from left to right and didn’t take the two column layout into account.
Computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac has developed a tool for sifting through scientific publications on various platforms. The Problematic Paper Screener scans through 130 million articles every week searching for nonsense phrases which act as a fingerprint for AI generated slush.