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Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real
Chris Stokel-Walker, Nature: "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. Bixonimania didn’t exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. The lead author was a phoney researcher named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photograph was created with AI. 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.
Osmanovic Thunström says the idea to invent Izgubljenovic and bixonimania came out of studies on how large language models work. Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. If that wasn’t sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California.
One paper’s acknowledgements thank 'Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise.' Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”. Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up."
Soon after Osmanovic Thunström first posted information about the phoney condition, it started showing up in the output of the most commonly used LLM chatbots. On 13 April 2024, Microsoft Bing’s Copilot was declaring that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition”, and on the same day, Google’s Gemini was informing users that “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light” and advising people to visit an ophthalmologist."
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