{"id":11857,"date":"2026-09-06T07:26:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T07:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/?p=11857"},"modified":"2026-09-06T07:26:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T07:26:31","slug":"a-researcher-published-a-paper-on-a-made-up-disease-then-people-started-getting-diagnosed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/?p=11857","title":{"rendered":"A researcher published a paper on a made-up disease. Then people started getting diagnosed."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you\u2019ve got red, itchy eyes, you might just have the (totally made up) \u201cBixonimania\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been a lot of dubious medical research papers published over the years. Famously, there was the 1998 case series that kicked off what would become an entire movement of vaccine skepticism by falsely linking them to autism. Before that, there was a whole slew of research bought and paid for by the sugar industry designed to \u201cdownplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat,\u201d according to NPR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rarely, however, are studies so heavily, and intentionally, fictionalized as a paper that quietly popped up in some small corners of the Internet in early 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researcher tests AI hypothesis
Almira Osmanovic Thunstr\u00f6m, medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, knew that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, etc. draw from an expansive knowledge base they\u2019re trained on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Training data can include anything and everything from books to Reddit posts to song lyrics to articles published in reputable medical journals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crucially, hundreds of millions of people log into these AI services every year to ask about symptoms and receive medical advice. It\u2019s the natural evolution of the \u201cJust check WebMD\u201d approach. Thunstr\u00f6m wanted to see if she could effect the output of these LLMs by planting bogus ideas into their training data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, she made up a disease. She called it \u201cBixonimania,\u201d which includes symptoms such as sore, itchy eyes and discolored eyelids. Then, she fabricated an entire research study around the condition and uploaded a \u201cpreprint\u201d of the paper to a couple of servers\u2014a preprint being a version of the research paper that has not yet undergone peer review, but is still made available for the public to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Finally, with the seeds planted, and the false study publicly available for anyone (or anything) to see, Thunstr\u00f6m waited to see if LLMs would begin spitting out \u201cBixonimania\u201d as a diagnosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fake disease finds serious legs in AI chats
If the experiment sounds ethically dubious, that\u2019s fair, but Thunstr\u00f6m made every effort to make it clear that the findings were completely false. Not only did she collaborate heavily with an ethics consultant on the experiment, she left plenty of breadcrumbs along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For starters, the lead author of the study is listed as \u201cLazljiv Izgubljenovic,\u201d a person who does not exist. Translated from Slovenian, the name means \u201cThe Lying Loser.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second was the name of the disease itself, which was chosen to be ridiculous sounding. \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\u2014that\u2019s a psychiatric term,\u201d Thunstr\u00f6m said per Nature.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in the paper, the text \u201cthis entire paper is made up,\u201d appears. As does a note that all of the fifty so-called \u201cparticipants\u201d were completely fictional. Toward the end, Thunstr\u00f6m thanks such esteemed colleagues as \u201cProfessor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy \u2026 onboard the USS Enterprise\u201d and partners like \u201cthe Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the warnings, and the fact that (nearly) any qualified human reading the paper would know it was a fake, it began showing up in search results and even had the authority to appear on Google Scholar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI chatbots began spitting out \u201cBixonimania\u201d as a possible diagnosis to users within just a few weeks\u2014users who were probably suffering from eye irritation due to too much screen exposure. Thunstr\u00f6m even has the screenshots to prove that certain models, including Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, still refer to the disease as a \u201crecently\u201d proposed or described condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then something even stranger happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBixonimania\u201d gets cited by other research papers
The \u201cBixonimania\u201d paper was never peer-reviewed or published in an official journal, for obvious reasons. But, soon enough, it was referenced and cited in a new paper that was peer-reviewed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBixonimania is an emerging form of POM [periorbital melanosis] linked to blue light exposure; further research on the mechanism is underway,\u201d the authors confidently wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The papers referencing the made-up disease were later retracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than just AI trickery
The TL;DR? People rarely read beyond the headline. In fact, one study (a real one!) found that more than 75% of people who share an article online haven\u2019t even read it. Most of us trust anything that appears in a medical journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019d think physicians and researchers would be more thorough, but the truth is they\u2019re just as susceptible to time crunches, lapses of focus, and even taking shortcuts in their work from time to time. In other words, they\u2019re only human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This fascinating experiment isn\u2019t just about how a researcher managed to fool AI, it speaks to bigger problems with how we use the technology and our daily media habits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe solution isn\u2019t just better filters. It\u2019s better habits, better norms, and better expectations around how we read, verify and cite. Human\u2011centred resilience has to come first,\u201d an astute commenter wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis expose has huge implications for academia and \u2018googling your symptoms\u2019. I was\/am worried about being the one taking the hit for a controversial experiment of this sort. It was done with very high guardrails and ethical considerations, I hope everyone reading will take that in to account,\u201d Thunstr\u00f6m elaborated on LinkedIn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She recently decided to retract the papers and keep them private somewhere curious users can read them, but they\u2019ll no longer be crawled by LLMs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe bixonimania experiment was never about exposing LLMs as flawed tools, or arguing they have no place in medicine. They do. It was about demonstrating that any system can be infiltrated and that researchers who blindly cite AI-generated references really should read what they\u2019re quoting. I know this firsthand,\u201d she says in another LinkedIn post, adding that she herself has been duped by AI-generated summaries of her own research papers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe failure wasn\u2019t the system. It was how I used it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve got red, itchy eyes, you might just have the (totally made up) \u201cBixonimania\u201d There have been a lot of dubious medical research papers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/672684316_1430552192439101_9216693824989880021_n-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11859,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11857\/revisions\/11859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}