https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y
"Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend
too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your
eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into
a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have
got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it
doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström,
a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the
skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server
in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test
whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then
spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a
medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her
uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author,
major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as
if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited
in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some
researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the
underlying papers."
Via ElenLeFoll and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
