Dispatch·AI & Science··
BlueskyHNReddit
The Fake Disease That Exposed AI's Citation Problem
Bixonimania turned a joke preprint into a medical trust test: AI systems made the fake condition legible long after people knew the trick.
The institutional problem is that citations are supposed to slow falsehood down, but AI systems have learned to use them as accelerants. The same mechanism that makes a chatbot answer feel grounded also gives a fake preprint a second life after the joke is visible to humans [1]. The Columbia audit's finding of fake citations in medical papers moves this from anecdote into infrastructure: verification has shifted from the claim to the appearance of a trail, and medical readers now have to inspect the trail itself.