Researcher invents fake disease 'bixonimania' — AI chatbots diagnose it anyway

Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg, fabricated a skin condition called bixonimania and seeded it across the internet via a fake university, a fake researcher named "the Lying Loser" (in Croatian), and a preprint paper funded by "the Galactic Triad" and thanking Professor Ross Geller. She expected human moderators or AI filters to catch it. They did not. Multiple popular AI chatbots began suggesting bixonimania as a possible diagnosis for users describing eye discomfort after screen use.

Worse, the fake paper was cited in a real peer-reviewed journal, which only boosted the condition's apparent legitimacy in AI training data. The experiment illustrates how thin the line is between "information on the internet" and "medical fact" as far as large language models are concerned — and how little it takes to cross it maliciously.