Got sore, itchy eyes' You're probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue. The condition doesn't appear in the standard medical literature ' because it doesn't exist. It's the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunstrom, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunstrom carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. 'I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,' she says. The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major...
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