The Blogs: Vegetative Electron Microscopy?

Dovetailing on last week’s theme of AI-generated art, try reading the above title to your table and ask, Can anyone can guess what it means???

If anyone guesses that it is meaningless, they are 100 percent right.So how do you explain that it appears in published scientific papers?

The answer is long and convoluted. In short, apparently there was an error in an automatic scan of an old article where the word “vegetative” and the phrase “electron microscopy” appeared in adjacent columns of text.

Once that error was out there, it became replicated when non-Anglophones used AI to generate translations (or possibly to generate fraudulent papers).

The details of this story were explained recently by Aaron Snoswell et al. in The Conversation, as an example of a real phenomenon:

Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem.

We Jews have a great sensitivity to the subject of transmission accuracy. Our entire body of wisdom and culture known as Judaism relies on accurate transmission and our scholars are always on the lookout for errors. Even when reading the Torah ritually in shul, if the Torah scroll contains even one error, it must be put aside until fixed, and if the reader makes even a tiny error, anyone paying attention shouts out the correction.

Question for your table – which system of knowledge transmission is in the long-run going to prove more accurate – the traditional Jewish one, or the new AI one?