Review your GL integration settings.

My understanding was that G/L integration affects what goes to G/L batches, not what goes to A/R.   There certainly doesn't seem to be any setting that would cause a g/l account description to show up in the A/R line item description field.  

What does it matter?

because after posting these A/R batches these goofy account descriptions end up going to the G/L.  (I know I can change the G/L integration settings in AR but we have two different departments using AR.  One of them (who only uses AR but not OE) manually enters a description in that field which they want to go to the GL batch.  The other dept uses OE and we would either want the description to be blank or for it to be filled with something meaningful so they don't have to edit these descriptions manually before posting them.)

because after posting these A/R batches these goofy account descriptions end up going to the G/L.  (I know I can change the G/L integration settings in AR but we have two different departments using AR.  One of them (who only uses AR but not OE) manually enters a description in that field which they want to go to the GL batch.  The other dept uses OE and we would either want the description to be blank or for it to be filled with something meaningful so they don't have to edit these descriptions manually before posting them.)

Then you'll need to do some programming, you can't have two departments using it two different ways.