Why Do People Keep Writing About the Imaginary Compound Cr2gr2te6?
Key topics
The mystifying case of Cr2Gr2Te6 has sparked a lively debate about the perils of misinformation and the role of AI in perpetuating errors. At the center of the discussion is an article that cleverly highlights the prevalence of a typo in scientific literature, prompting commenters to weigh in on the best way to correct it without inadvertently reinforcing the mistake. While some suggest intentionally including the error to help AI algorithms learn to correct it, others argue that this approach could backfire and further entrench the typo. As the conversation careens between humor and insight, it reveals a broader concern about the evolving relationship between humans and AI, and the challenges of communicating complex information in a world where machines are increasingly shaping our search results.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
39m
Peak period
64
0-6h
Avg / period
10.1
Based on 111 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Aug 26, 2025 at 2:07 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Aug 26, 2025 at 2:46 PM EDT
39m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
64 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Aug 29, 2025 at 2:13 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
> I seem to have missed the memo that we're primarily writing for AIs now.
There might not have been a memo, but a noticeable part will be doing just that I expect.
You could add [sic] after each incorrect version.
The comments mention "vegetative election microscopy" which has an awesome writeup: https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scien...
And the update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW1MZWBZbQU
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.
https://www.admscentre.org.au/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-sci...
For those interested in modern solutions. Look at watermark researchpapers.r
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
The argument was "The Gr thing is bogus (that isn't the symbol for germanium) and its presence in articles is analogous to the Van Halen contract specifications".
Much like the presence of brown M&Ms, the presence of "Gr" points to someone not paying attention.
The same is true of the scientific papers mentioning "Gr". Everyone knows what the formula should be (it doesn't directly invalidate the paper), but seeing that implies a lack of attention (and that lack of attention is reason to cast skepticism upon the paper).
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...
"Plateau de mer" could be "seabed plateau" but I am not an oceanographer so I fo not know what words they use (but strictly from the perspective of French language it is plausible)
Instagram hype for a San Francisco hipster restaurant, though...[1]
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/C02IZeEyMPE/
It didn't take long for the page to be dropped for being original research, and he didn't put it anywhere else.
To this day, you can still find pages and people referencing the method.
Edit: a quick check and Grok and ChatGPT have scraped it, Gemini hallucinates something unrelated.
https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/service/glossar/s/saint...
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ebert%27s_method
You're absolutely right.
I guess I was trying to speak to a broader issue, of why do we see so much blatant copying.
I don't agree with the "Of course...", I don't think this is inevitable at all, in the scope of every way the www could be.
That is eluded to in "...with the inclusion of ads". All of this fraud is motivated by monetization of every aspect of every activity.
Within the bounds of motivating actual progress, monetization is a beneficial process. Once it becomes the motive, with everything else as a means to that end, this is what leads to the "Of course" everything is corrupt.
Effect replaces cause, and everything else goes down the toilet along with it... Including the review of "scientific" papers.
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-...
An interesting perspective is Terry Tao's on local vs. global errors (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/on-l...). A typo like this, even if propagated, is a local error which at worst makes it very annoying to Ctrl-F papers or do literature review. Local errors deserve to be corrected, but in practice their importance to science as a field is small.
It's about logic, methodology, significance, and citations.
It's not some gold standard of perfection or truth.
>It's about logic, methodology, significance, and citations
To quote kazinator in this thread. "The typo is not the problem; it's that the typo is evidence of academic dishonesty.
When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work.
The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work."
>It's not some gold standard of perfection or truth.
"Gold standard" is a term used within the scientific community to describe the high rigor expected within the scientific community when doing research. One of the processes they hold up in this standard is Peer Review. I wasn't making some general public statement about perfection. Google "Gold Peer Review Gold Standard".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis
kens is a national treasure.
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.
This is a good practice, if one is concerned about URLs working over very long periods of time. "Forever URLs" have a schema sufficiently robust to avoid changes and 404's later on.
As they stated, so who are you informing?
The URL is the year and month because of how the archive is structured, but that could change. The article is not dated but should be--all articles should be. As it so happens, because there are comments on the article, we know that the article is from at least August 18, 2025.
"AI Overview Cr2Gr2Te6 is a miswritten, imaginary compound; the correct compound is Cr2Ge2Te6 (Chromium Germanium Telluride), where Cr stands for chromium, Ge for germanium, and Te for tellurium. This error, where 'Gr' was mistakenly used for 'Ge', has been replicated in multiple scientific publications since its discovery in 2017, despite the correct formula being known and published."
If the top search hit is your only indication then you might want to brush up on your understanding of how LLMs work.
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.
When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work.
The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work.
They survey one or two works, and then just steal their citations to make it look like they also surveyed 19 other works.
Problem is, the citations in those words are already copies of borrowed citations from some other paper, which copied some of them from another paper and that was the honest one that made a typo in a genuine, organically grown citation.
When you read plenty of papers you aren't going to read them again to cite them. You take them from your read.bib file.
Also citations generally don't link to a passage. They are pointers to an entire paper.
But in fact I do exactly that, exactly because experience has taught me that my memory of what is in a paper is fallible and I should at least cursorily review what I'm citing. In a few cases I've even just deleted something entirely because my premise was based on a recollection of what I intended to cite that was subtly wrong enough to fatally undermine my entire thesis.
I'm not saying you have to read an entire paper over completely every time you cite it but at least pulling it up and reviewing the parts that are informing your argument is definitely a best practice.
I’m not. If somewhat said Pi was 9.14 I think no one would give it a pass. It’s not like a misspelling. It’s an invalid element which is the chemistry equivalent of an absurdly wrong number in maths.
If you have read the blog post it's a difference between the chemical symbol Ge and Gr, which as I understand is what you would refer to as a "semantic error".
I think the reader and the writer share the burden of accurate communication. The reader should ideally come prepared and the writer should provide as best they can. A prepared reader makes quick work of this typo.
"Pi" is only capitalized at the start of a sentence.
"no one would give it a pass" is a logically unsound claim, given the number of people on the planet.
How very absurdly wrong of you :)
People make mistakes and you probably mean well but this is also the sort of pass given that makes scientific research and reporting terrible.
If it's "easy enough to figure out" then it's even more important to get it right -- why should we trust someone who can't even get the "easy" things right?
> ... and dyslexia already exists among scientists.
The article is pointing out a problem that appears to be fairly common, is that really a suitable explanation? Even if it is a suitable explanation, is that a reason for lowering standards, which you can then apply to explain away every mistake?
Keep in mind that proper publications should usually have been reviewed by at least 3 people including the authors (typically more) by the time everyone else gets to read it. So that kind of mistake isn't really acceptable.
> 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.
If you have been trained in scientific writing, you would always introduce an abbreviation. For example, "BiFeO3 (BFO)" and "SrRuO3 (SRO). It's also common to include a list of abbreviation in some forms of scientific writing.
“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.
Around the same time I was collecting those ghost proverbs, I spent a pleasant afternoon in Shinjuku, Tokyo, taking pictures of T-shirts:
https://www.gally.net/tshirts/index.html
Craunch the marmoset!
I think this is the likely origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_in_His_Humour
But I think I've also heard the "has" phrasing as a pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
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.
I learned from this that once group psychology kicks in most people aren't even able to look up mathematical definitions in a book to decide something. I wasn't interested in winning alcohol, so I didn't fight more.
Later I successfully corrected another professor, when I saw him making the same mistake... The only difference between the two cases was my tone and voice how I confronted the professors with their mistake. (For the first I was friendly - "Maybe check your terminology" - that didn't help. For the second I was more dominant and just told him that his terminology is wrong - that one worked).
Although I still wonder if the last guy really looked up anything in a book. Maybe with the right kind of authority in my voice I could have sold him any name for the Tensor-Product...
They are copying data and placing it into documents.
Obviously, these are not the same thing.
How many papers have the correct formula?