by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
There’s a story circulating out there that even made the attention of this website’s regular forum posters, and it’s once of those happy synchronicities that the same story made it into this past week’s email inbox, because it’s another one of those stories that signals that Not All is as Hunky Dory With The Artificial Intelligence Narrative As the Powers That Be Want Us to Believe. In fact, when you view the story as being a g(r)ift from the same group of people that gave us the Covid planscamdemic g(r)ift and the Follow The Science g(r)ift (you know, people like Baal Gates, Dr. Lieber, Dr. Fausti et al.) and that are now giving us the tokenizaed assets g(r)ift (you know, people like the aptly-surnamed Larry Fink), it has some profoundly disturbing implications, especially for a society that through its endless sponsorship of the latest edubabble and pedagogiblither has managed to create one of the stupidest cultures on the planet. (Don’t believe me? Then just listen to their favorite one dimensional “music” that they pound on you relentlessly through their sub-woofers, and you’ll be convinced that it will not be long at all before the high fashion of the culture will be a loin cloth and a femur bone through the nasal septum, with perhaps a few teeth arranged as a bracelet or necklace. But I digress.) So many people shared different versions of the story that we’ll stick with a couple that were sent by E.E., who has our gratitude for doing so:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
AI Chatbots Diagnosed a Disease That Doesn’t Exist
Here’s the gist of the story:
Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg, uploaded two fake academic papers describing bixonimania to a preprint server. Preprint servers do not peer-review submissions, but their content is routinely indexed and pulled into the training pipelines and retrieval systems used by major chatbots. Within weeks, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity were citing bixonimania as a real condition, sometimes confidently describing its causes, symptoms and recommended treatments.
The contamination did not stop with the chatbots. A subsequent paper in Cureus, a journal owned by Springer Nature, cited bixonimania in its own discussion of digital-age eye conditions. After Nature contacted the journal for comment, the paper was retracted on 30 March 2026. Coverage of the fallout is available at Nurse.Org and Futurism.
Now what’s extremely interesting about this and other articles is the conclusions that they draw from the episode. You might want to pour yourself a couple of fingers – or maybe even a whole hand – of your favorite adult drink and take a long hard draft of it before reading on:
This story keeps getting trimmed down to “AI fell for a fake disease,” which misses the structural finding underneath. The chatbots were notably more likely to hallucinate around bixonimania when the prompt was framed in formal clinical language. Nature reports that when the input looked like a hospital discharge note or a clinical paper, the hallucination rate rose.
In other words, the register that would make a human reader more cautious, the register of a clinical paper or hospital note, makes a chatbot less cautious. That inverts the trust signal patients are usually told to look for. The model treats authoritative-sounding language as evidence that the underlying content is also authoritative, which is the opposite of how a clinician is trained to read it. (Emphasis added)
In other words: the real story is not that artificial intelligence fell for a fake disease, but that artificial intelligence not only fell for a fake disease, but that it fell even harder for it when the disease was surrounded by a context of pseudo-scientific bloviation. And that should send a huge warning sign not just about AI, but the culture in general in which AI is being trumpeted. Many years ago I wrote a four-volume “tome” on the differences of philosophical, theological, and general cultural “outlook” between eastern and western Europe that occurred as the direct result of very different theological presuppositions. In the section of that work (it is titled God, History, and Dialectic, for those interested) that was dedicated to the presentation of Gnosticism, I departed rather heavily from typical “seminary” presentations of those systems, concentrating not on the specific doctrines of this or that Gnostic system, but rather upon the strategies and tactics with which they promoted those systems. One of those strategies was to “contrive orthodox contexts”, i.e., to dress specific statements – or even whole collections of statements such as the so-called Gnostic gospels – in a surrounding context that would appear to confer legitimacy and authority to the textual source containing them.
