Mastodawn

Science cannot live by LLM alone, part 12,386.

As an experiment, Almira Osmanovic Thunström published fake papers about a fake eye disease that credited Professor Maria Bohm of Starfleet Academy. They were said to be funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation in partnership with the University of the Fellowship of the Ring.

Despite such obvious trickery, within a few weeks, chatbots were citing the studies as real:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

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?

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Anthk 2d ago

@mattsheffield That was mi idea from long ago, to
generate tons of bullshit to LLM's untill the stop producing
'human curated' content and they just become Megahal/Hailo-like
Markov chains-bound chatbots.

Gutenberg it's a legal (and great) source for that. Mix Doyle with
Lovecraft and Twain among travel and newspaper guides.
Keep feeding them in a loop until they become Dadaism 2.0.

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ticho

@anthk @mattsheffield Behold: https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

iocaine - the deadliest poison known to AI