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<\/p>\nThe eye condition bixonimania doesn\u2019t exist, but neither bots nor some researchers caught that the content was fabricated\u2014despite obvious clues<\/p>\n
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Margherita Bassi<\/a><\/p>\n | Daily Correspondent<\/p>\n June 11, 2026 1:59 p.m.<\/p>\n A team of researchers put out information about a fake disease, and A.I.-powered chatbots fell for it. Many people turn to the internet for health advice. And now, with artificial intelligence-powered chatbots at the tips of everyone\u2019s fingers, it can feel like medical professionals are just a few clicks away.<\/p>\n But a recent project involving a fake health condition has highlighted just how vulnerable these systems and the people who use them are to misinformation\u2014even when it is painfully obvious that the information is wrong.<\/p>\n Last year, if you had described symptoms like sore, itchy eyes and pink eyelids to ChatGPT\u2014one of many chatbots that rely on a type of A.I. called a large language model<\/a>\u00a0(LLM)\u2014it may have pointed to a condition associated with computer screen use called bixonimania.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not real.<\/p>\n The illness was invented by Almira Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m<\/a>, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and her team. They conjured up the condition to see whether LLMs, which are trained on vast amounts of data, often scraped from the web, could filter out misinformation.<\/p>\n The idea struck Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m when she was teaching students about LLMs and explaining where their training data came from. \u201cIt was interesting how few of them, or how few even people within A.I., understand how large language models are built,\u201d she tells Rachel Feltman on Scientific American\u2019s \u201cScience Quickly<\/a>\u201d podcast. <\/p>\n \u201cSo, I really wanted to have a clear case that leaves breadcrumbs throughout the whole system to show both how data is processed, how data is churned out and how the prediction model and training model works when it comes to distributing information,\u201d adds Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m, who is also an A.I. strategist and innovation manager at Chalmers Industriteknik, a Swedish research and development organization.<\/p>\n The team began to circulate information on bixonimania in early 2024. They put out two blog posts on the website Medium and two research<\/a> reports<\/a> on a preprint server, where scientists post studies that have not been peer-reviewed, according to\u00a0Nature<\/a>\u2019s Chris Stokel-Walker. The papers\u2019 lead author was named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic\u2014which translates to \u201clying loser\u201d\u2014and one of the studies\u2019 titles says something akin to \u201cHyperpigmentation: A Real B.S. Design.\u201d (Both reports have since been taken down by the preprint server.)<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t think that preprints, which are academia\u2019s sort of tabloids\u2014because anything can end up there\u2014would be weighed into the database as seriously as it was,\u201d Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m tells \u201cScience Quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n Did you know? The inventor of the first chatbot warned people about A.I.\u2019s threats<\/p>\n In the 1960s, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum invented what\u2019s considered the world\u2019s first chatbot, a \u201cpsychotherapist\u201d called Eliza<\/a>. He later realized that the program \u201ccould induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people\u201d and spent much of his life describing the dangers<\/a> of the convincing technology.<\/p>\n Sure enough, LLMs started to reference the fake condition, which now has its own\u00a0Wikipedia page<\/a>. In April 2024, Microsoft Bing\u2019s Copilot said that \u201cBixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition,\u201d Google\u2019s Gemini explained that \u201cBixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light,\u201d and OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT told users whether their symptoms might mean they had the illness, according to\u00a0Nature. While some responses came from asking the bots about bixonimania directly, others came from queries about excess eyelid coloration due to blue light.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates,\u201d says Alex Ruani<\/a>, a misinformation researcher at University College London who wasn\u2019t involved in the project, to Nature. \u201cIf the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren\u2019t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we\u2019re doomed.\u201d<\/p>\n While tools like A.I. and the internet are helpful,\u00a0\u201cit\u2019s up to us to ensure that we are using them and not being manipulated by them,\u201d write Jonathan Goodman<\/a> and Mariam Rashid<\/a>, social scientists at the University of Cambridge who weren\u2019t involved with the project, for the Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n A major problem highlighted in the project is that some scientists cited the bogus preprints, too, indicating that they did not actually read the research. If they had, they would have realized its fabricated nature.<\/p>\n Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m and her colleagues made it very obvious, sprinkling the fictitious studies with things like funding from the Galactic Triad and Lord of the Rings,\u00a0as well as\u00a0appreciation of colleagues at the Starship Enterprise and Professor Ross Geller, per \u201cScience Quickly.\u201d At least one of the papers even explicitly stated, \u201cThis entire paper is made up,\u201d reports\u00a0Nature.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the project confirms that these LLMs take their information from the internet, and the internet contains a lot of misinformation. Humans, therefore, should be more critical of A.I. outputs.<\/p>\n \u201cMisinformation has always existed,\u201d write Goodman and Rashid for the Conversation. \u201cWhat\u2019s new is the speed at which it spreads, the tools that generate it and how convincingly it mimics the real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The eye condition bixonimania doesn\u2019t exist, but neither bots nor some researchers caught that the content was fabricated\u2014despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-731371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2149196192.jpg\")
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