Dry itchy eyes may\u00a0indicate\u00a0an underlying\u00a0fictitious disease called\u00a0bixonimania, according to multiple artificial intelligence platforms\u00a0that have\u00a0propagated\u00a0the bogus disease.<\/p>\n
Almira Osmanovic\u00a0Thunstr\u00f6m\u00a0from the University of Gothenburg created the fake condition to test how large language models absorb and promote medical misinformation,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to Breitbart.<\/p>\n On March 15, 2024, Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m published two blog posts on Medium, describing sore, tired, pink eyes as a developing condition from excessive blue light exposure. She also published two papers on the academic network SciProfiles in late April and May 2024, under the pseudonym Lazljiv Izgubljenovic and an AI-generated photo.<\/p>\n Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m gave numerous clues the disease was fake, even in its name, according to<\/a> Nature, which originally broke the story. <\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania \u2013 that\u2019s a psychiatric term,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Additionally, throughout the papers she listed fake universities, such as Asteria Horizon University, The Starfleet Academy and the University of Fellowship of the Ring. She even included direct statements discrediting the entire paper\u2019s research: \u201cthis entire paper is made up\u201d and \u201cfifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group,\u201d Nature reports. <\/p>\n But AI platforms consumed and presented the fraudulent science as fact. <\/p>\n For example, on April 13, 2024, Microsoft Bing\u2019s Copilot called bixonimania a \u201crare condition,\u201d and Google\u2019s Gemini recommended users with itchy eyes visit an ophthalmologist with concerns of bixonimania, Breitbart reports. That same month, Perplexity AI reported one in 90,000 individuals contracted the disease, and OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT began diagnosing users, Nature reports<\/a>. <\/p>\n Eventually, the fake condition made its way into a scientific journal: Cureus, published by Springer Nature. This research cited the fake papers as legitimate sources, marking a failure of the scientific process, according to Alex Ruani, a doctoral researcher in health misinformation at University College London. Cureus retracted the paper March 30, 2026, after Nature informed editors of fraudulent citations. <\/p>\n Nature and Breitbart contacted the AI companies, which either gave no response or claimed AI technology has improved significantly since Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m\u2019s experiment. <\/p>\n \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 Ruani said. \u201cThis is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dry itchy eyes may\u00a0indicate\u00a0an underlying\u00a0fictitious disease called\u00a0bixonimania, according to multiple artificial intelligence platforms\u00a0that have\u00a0propagated\u00a0the bogus disease. Almira Osmanovic\u00a0Thunstr\u00f6m\u00a0from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,1069,1374,1657,4731],"class_list":{"0":"post-5275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-big-tech","11":"tag-disease","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-misinformation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}