During the first half of the 1990s, I taught many adult-ed classes to Lawrence Chamber of Commerce members. When helping teach small business owners understand how best to make use of the internet, the prevailing wisdom even back in those days was that only around half of what was on the world wide web (does anyone call it that any more?) was accurate / true.
It is much, much less today. And given that the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is built on information you can find on the internet, I have more that a few reservations about AI, which older less gullible folk like me are permitted to have, at least for now.
Let me share an example for my two readers.
According to ChatGPT itself (so it must be true!), more than 40 million people globally use ChatGPT EVERY DAY for health-related questions, and 230 million users each week ask it health and wellness-related questions.
This is obviously troubling to the medical industry and in one recent case, has been blamed for the death of a 19 year old (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/open-ai-chatgpt-drug-overdose-lawsuit/).
Let me nevertheless ask, have your eyes ever felt sore and itchy after spending too much time staring at a screen?
If you typed these symptoms into a search engine last year, major AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity, would ALL likely have told you that you were suffering from “bixonimania,” a condition that, it turns out, was entirely fabricated by a researcher wanting to test how easily AI systems could be tricked into spreading false medical information.
Large language models treated it as real and, in doing so, helped turn a fictional disease into a legitimate-sounding health concern.
The inventor of bixonimania was Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Center for Digital Health and Chalmers Industriteknik.
I found an interview she gave explaining how she created it. Her objective was to highlight to her medical students how few people, even those within the AI industry, understand how large language AI models are built.
In her own words: “I knew that most of data that these commercial large language models, and, quite clearly, all language models, even the noncommercial ones, are built on is Common Crawl. It is a nonprofit organization that crawls the Internet for written and digitized information and has done so since 2007 … So knowing that anything that goes in there will come out as information, and humans are in the loop and sift out data, but those humans are not always able to sift out data, especially if it looks credible.”
Thunström uploaded two fake papers then sprinkled references (“bread crumbs”) to the papers in blogs and on social media (those are also crawled by AI) so that bixonimania seemed credible for the AI system.
Her two papers were loaded with red flags that should have been impossible to miss.
The fictional lead author supposedly worked at “Asteria Horizon University” in the nonexistent “Nova City, California.”
The acknowledgements section thanked “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy” on the USS Enterprise, with funding credited to “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery.”
The papers even stated outright that “this entire paper is made up.”
The results were alarming for anyone in healthcare. Not only did the chatbots repeat the fake diagnosis, but they elaborated on it, offered clinical-style advice, and even recommended that patients visit an ophthalmologist.
And Thunström chose the name bixonimania deliberately. The suffix “-mania” is used exclusively in psychiatry, so no legitimate eye condition would ever carry that label.
Just to put some icing on that cake, three researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in India subsequently published a paper (later retracted) in Cureus, a peer-reviewed journal, that cited the bixonimania preprints as legitimate sources.
In case either of you haven’t yet worked it out, aside from providing an incredibly low level of customer service, AI seems to me to be all about leveling the playing field and dumbing down society. When you stop thinking for yourself, stop researching, stop reading, and start accepting everything you see or hear online without question, the gray clouds will gather and you may become the playthings of the elite.
Governments, corporations and others seeking to influence what you think, know and do, already play similar games with AI.
Beware those who are artful in disguising their true intentions!
