As I say above, even if the tank story is apocryphal, it captures the tendency of neural nets (modern or ancient, doesn't matter) to overfit to irrelevant details (which, btw, is what Layerwise Relevance Propagation from my comment above is trying to determine).
This is probably the reason why this story has been repeated so many times (and with so many variations): beause it rings true to anyone who has ever trained a neural net, or interacted with a neural net for any significant amount of time. Unfortunately, the article you cite chooses to suggest otherwise.
In any case, if the tank story is an urban legend it has its roots firmly in reality.
I understand that the scenario rings true, but Plyphon_ specifically asked for "a link to that tank/weather study", so the fact that it doesn't seem to exist is of primary importance.
From the tone of Plyphon_'s comment it seems to me pretty obvious that they had at least read the article you link above and the point of the comment was not to actually get a source for OP's comment, but to score some kind of internet burn points. Judging from the earlier greying-out of Plyphon_'s comment I'm not the only person who thought so. I don't think that kind of comment should be validated with an actual response. It is borderline snark and certainly does not contribute anything to the conversation.
I'm happy to accept my mistake if I have misunderstood Plyphon_'s comment.
This is probably the reason why this story has been repeated so many times (and with so many variations): beause it rings true to anyone who has ever trained a neural net, or interacted with a neural net for any significant amount of time. Unfortunately, the article you cite chooses to suggest otherwise.
In any case, if the tank story is an urban legend it has its roots firmly in reality.