I think established authors should try to sprinkle obvious mistakes like that on purpose once in a while in the literature and then see how much it spreads.

How many papers have the correct formula?

I recently corrected an error in this wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Shionomisaki

Which stated: "Geologically, the cape is a flat uplifted seafood plateau"

My comment for the change: I'm not an oceanographer, but I'm pretty sure it's not a "seafood plateau". Changed to "seabed plateau"

Afterward, out of curiosity, I did a search for "seafood plateau".

I was shocked at the number of sites that exactly copied that error along with the rest of the page. Most of these sites were clones of wikipedia with the inclusion of ads.

It didn't seem that these sites were LLM generated (they were exact copies), but this seems to be the case for many scientific paper submissions now.

Where it all goes from here is extremely unclear, but it does seem a disruption to many fields which are dependent on written material is in progress...

Though since he didn't date his article, it's unclear how long it has been out there so unclear as well whether it made its way into training data. Judging from the comments and the URL, it's quite new, but again, he should add a date to his articles.

They are copying data and placing it into documents.

Obviously, these are not the same thing.

I didn't catch the error the first time around because I autocorrected to Ge--there are only so many anions that can make that formula work and staring at these formulas all day long can make you go cross eyed anyway.

What I think is more dangerous to understanding is skipping formulas in favor of initials! BFO instead of BiFeO3, or BT instead of Bi2Te3, SRO for SrRuO3, LSFO for La0.3Sr0.7FeO3 abbreviations that I think obscure too much detail. You can more easily wander into talking about different things with the same terms. Such abbreviations are already endemic in condensed matter physics.

“Every man has his humo(u)r.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html

“Losers are always in the wrong.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html

In their heyday, dozens of English-Japanese dictionaries were published in Japan:

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html

Producing an original dictionary from scratch would have been expensive and time consuming, so most publishers borrowed liberally from each other.

In Quantum Mechanics the professors of my University consistently confused the terms Tensor-Product and Direct-Product. They all taught in lecture that the Tensor-Product was called "Direct-Product". In Mathematics this is just wrong. The definitions about what is what has been clear for about 100 years...

I called them out on that. The end result was, that the professor offered a bet in front of audience that he was right. The thing was simple - you just have to look up the definitions in any mathematical book. But nobody did this... Next lecture the professor declared himself the winner of the bet. The audience collected money. And on the next big student event they presented him a bottle of some nice alcohol as a price for his win. (They stopped Music for the party and made a big event about handing him the bottle)...

I learned that in University people aren't even able to look up a mathematical definition in a book... Nobody cares, especially those students that like to organise things don't - they surely meanwhile have made career as big heads in University councils...

Solution of the confusion I think was that in the beginning of QM the terms in mathematics were not so well defined yet. In 1910 Physics people most likely copied some wrong terminology - and some of it most likely can still be found in footnotes somewhere in physics - or in some oral tradition of local groups of professors.