We got lots of spam at MetaFilter and one time someone posted trying to promote something called "Exemplary Purchase" and we kept wondering what are they were trying to say until we realized it was a translation error, they meant to say "Best Buy" in English.
Ten years on, every time I drive past a BestBuy, I think "Exemplary Purchase!"
@mathowie
from 2021:
> (...) Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence.’
Examples:
Colossal information -> Big data
Counterfeit consciousness -> Artificial intelligence
Flag to commotion -> Signal to noise
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0
Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts from a few keywords has been documented. Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as 'counterfeit consciousness' instead of 'artificial intelligence.' We combed the literature for tortured phrases and study one reputable journal where these concentrated en masse. Hypothesising the use of advanced language models we ran a detector on the abstracts of recent articles of this journal and on several control sets. The pairwise comparisons reveal a concentration of abstracts flagged as 'synthetic' in the journal. We also highlight irregularities in its operation, such as abrupt changes in editorial timelines. We substantiate our call for investigation by analysing several individual dubious articles, stressing questionable features: tortured writing style, citation of non-existent literature, and unacknowledged image reuse. Surprisingly, some websites offer to rewrite texts for free, generating gobbledegook full of tortured phrases. We believe some authors used rewritten texts to pad their manuscripts. We wish to raise the awareness on publications containing such questionable AI-generated or rewritten texts that passed (poor) peer review. Deception with synthetic texts threatens the integrity of the scientific literature.
@koantig @mathowie
“Let’s raise the flag to commotion” would be a wonderful battle cry for a team of imaging technicians though.
The worst mistranslation I’ve seen in academic literature was “glass acid”. There are a dozen papers out there (mostly on traditional Chinese medicine) describing acid glass being inserted into joints as therapy. Poking glass into body parts seems an unwise thing to do (they meant hyaluronic acid, from Greek hyaline = glass-like appearance, not being actual glass).
I gave up on them 10 years ago. They have been going downhill for 25 years now.
Shades of "Donkey Kong" being a "stubborn gorilla".
@mathowie I love that.
We were trying to arrange to meet at a restaurant with my grandmother. No idea where the 'Original Gordon' was. She was misreading 'Oriental Garden'. Original Gordon's become a placeholder when we're not sure where to go forevermore
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