None of us needed another disease to worry about — and yet we (sort of) got one anyway.

Kind of.

Per a report in 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.

Me looking at that list of symptoms:

As it turns out, those of us who suffer from "sore, itchy eyes" after glaring at a computer for nine hours per day were apparently suffering from "bixonimania."

The medical literature began identifying this condition in 2024. You had a university study, you had the symptoms — heck, you even had imagery of the condition itself:

It all seemed to check out! And I mean, how often do we get sore eyes from looking at screens for too long? It was not a stretch to imagine a particular condition attached to such an activity.

And yet, as it turned out, "bixomania" itself was completely and entirely a myth:

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 see if she could fool AI large language models into believing it was real. As she put it: "I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database."

Boy, did she! As Nature points out, the experiment "worked too well," with AI systems quickly gobbling up the fake condition and spitting it out as if it were legitimate.

There were signs that the whole thing was bogus from the start, of course. The lead researcher was a fake person named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, who worked at the also-fake "Asteria Horizon University" in the (once again, fake) Nova City, California. One paper thanked "Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy" for her contributions from the lab on the USS Enterprise. The research was allegedly funded by "the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation."

Oh, and what about that researcher, Lazljiv Izgubljenovic? That's Bosnian, and it translates directly to, well, see for yourself:

If the jokes weren't enough, the researchers just straight up told readers it was all bogus:

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" and "Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group".

Multiple LLMs indeed began parroting the misinformation, including Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. ChatGPT was at first skeptical, according to Nature, with the AI initially claiming the disease was "probably a made-up, fringe, or pseudoscientific label." But a few days later it said the fake disease was a "proposed new subtype of periorbital melanosis."

Preprints of the research were retracted after the ruse became known. But as University College London researcher Alex Ruani told Nature, the problem is bigger than AI bots citing fake info:

Ruani says the problem goes beyond LLMs because the bixonimania experiment also hoodwinked humans who cited the fake research. "We need to protect our trust like gold," she says. "It's a mess right now."

Yes it is!