People with no clue of tech and how it works are jumping around saying that AI will take over the world. The olds want corporations to fire everyone hoping AI can cut costs and inflate their 401ks. They didn't realize that nothing is free, AI costs money and if you fire your staff, these AI companies will just gouge you and make you pay. You will have AI but not much else.
AI is not innovative. It cannot generate brand new ideas that do not exist somewhere in the world already. At most, it might combine 2 old ideas and make a "new" one. But there are too many stupid people who want to outsource their thinking to AI and calling it "progress".
I foresee bad things happening because someone with large responsibility would replace humans with AI thinking he can save a few cents.
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y
Bixonimania doesn't exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?
AI is not innovative. It cannot generate brand new ideas that do not exist somewhere in the world already. At most, it might combine 2 old ideas and make a "new" one. But there are too many stupid people who want to outsource their thinking to AI and calling it "progress".
I foresee bad things happening because someone with large responsibility would replace humans with AI thinking he can save a few cents.
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y
Bixonimania doesn't exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?
Quote:
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.
Fabricating an illness
Bixonimania didn't exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. Then, on 26 April and 6 May that year, two preprints about the condition popped up on the academic social network SciProfiles (see https://doi.org/qzm5 and https://doi.org/qzm4). The lead author was a phoney researcher named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photograph was created with AI.
