Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness? By Chris Stokel-Walker

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=4b50fd2341-nature-briefing-daily-20260408&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-33f35e09ea-50432164 Why scientists made up a fake disease To test how easy it is to poison the information spewed out by AI-powered search results and chatbots, medical researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström and her team uploaded two fake studies to a preprint server in early 2024. They included plenty of red flags: the results even say “this entire paper is made up”. But soon after, systems such as Copilot and ChatGPT were telling users all about ‘bixonimania’ as if it were real, although they sometimes expressed skepticism.