A couple of decades ago I got really confused because I found a lot of papers referring to "comer" cubes, but could not find an actual definition. Eventually I figured out that these were actually "corner" cubes, but somewhere a transcription error occurred that merged the r and n into an m, and this error kept getting propagated because people were just copying and pasting.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 3 points 4 weeks ago

That’s an apt example from English, especially given the visual similarity of the error.

It’s the kind of error we would expect AI to be especially resilient against, since the phrase “corner cube” probably appears many times in the training dataset.

Likewise scanning electron microscopes are common instruments in many schools and commercial labs, so an AI writing tool is likely to infer a correction needed given the close similarity.

Transcription errors by human authors, however, have been dutifully copied into future works since we began writing stuff down.