The Fake Disease That Fooled Every Chatbot

Researchers did not stumble into bixonimania — they engineered it as a probe. The condition was designed with enough surface plausibility to pass informal inspection: screen-related eye symptoms, a Latinate name, a backstory that gestured at a real mechanism. What it lacked was any existence outside the fake papers the team uploaded to a preprint server. That gap between surface plausibility and actual existence is precisely what the experiment was built to measure. The result confirmed that popular chatbots cannot close that gap — they assess the form of a…