Scientists Built a Fake Disease. AI Diagnosed It as Real.

The bixonimania experiment is not an edge case — it is a controlled demonstration of the floor beneath which medical AI reliability cannot fall. The research team did not exploit a subtle ambiguity or an obscure domain; they fabricated everything: the condition, the researchers, the institution, the funding. The chatbots validated it anyway. What this establishes is that the absence of real-world grounding in deployed medical AI is not a known gap being actively managed — it is an architectural assumption that plausibility of form substitutes for validity of content.