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A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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In some cases, it’s people who’ve done the research and written the paper who then use an LLM to give it a final polish. Often, it’s people who are writing in a non-native language.
Doesn’t make it good or right, but adds some context.
Sure, and I'm sympathetic to the baffling difficulties of English, but use Google Translate and ask someone who's more fluent for help with the final polish (as a single suggestion). Trusting your work, trusting science to an LLM is lunacy.
It might be hard for them to find someone who is both fluent in english AND knows the field well enough to know vegetative electron microscopy is not a thing. Most universities have one general translation help service and science has a lot of field-specific weird terms.
That's why he said start with Google Translate. Because Google Translate isn't giving gibberish like vegetative electron microscopy.