original posts and art are at @chorses. asks are off now because i have almost 6,000 plus over 200 unanswered DMs. im so so sorry. . hi! I'm Gino(he/him), an adult(19-22) Im a white transman doing his best to be antiracist, if i fuck up, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. . Say hi, i only bite bigots! . You wont like me if you judge protestors who use violence, are an exclusionist, gatekeep or stigmatize any disorder, are a leftist who doesnât believe a better world includes and supports disabled folks, or hate kids as a group.
Operation Olive Branch's (https://linktr.ee/opolivebranch) spreadsheet of verified fundraisers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vtMLLOzuc6GpkFySyVtKQOY2j-Vvg0UsChMCFst_WLA/edit?usp=drivesdk of people suffering the genocides of Gaza, Congo and Sudan.
@Nabulsi and @El-Shab-Hussein's list of verified fundraisers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yYkNp5U3ANwILl2MknJi9G7ArY4uVTEEQ1CVfzR8Ioo/edit?usp=drivesdk for Gaza and @El-Shab-Hussein's list of verified fundraisers from his direct contacts in Gaza and Sudan: https://www.tumblr.com/el-shab-hussein/748756401076207616/hey-guys-i-have-a-priority-fundraiser-rotation?source=share
Focus Congo, an ONG accepting donations to provide aid to the Congolese: https://www.focuscongo.com/en/spende/
Friends of the Congo, another ONG that accepts donations to help Congo: https://friendsofthecongo.org/
Khartoum aid Kitchen: an initiative to feed people in the Sudanese state of Khartoum, affected by famine: https://www.gofundme.com/f/fight-hunger-in-sudan-the-khartoum-kitchen-appeal
Gazafunds.com: a website that presents you with rotating verified fundraisers for Gazan people and prioritizes those most in need: gazafunds.com
Esimsforgaza: initiative to donate e-sims to provide the essential Internet acess to families in Gaza, so that they can receive donations, search information useful for survival and contact their relatives: https://gazaesims.com/ Instructions in english for donating an esim: https://gazaesims.com/ and instructions in Spanish, translated by me: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DHHsHSAFJQrr3GPtZ5iG_5xUSGkIjVwpkpQy57XR3x8/edit?usp=drivesdk
Crips for esims: initiative to buy esims for Esimsforgaza. If you don't have the financial stability to maintain an esim, it is recommended you donate here; the initiative will use that money to maintain esims steadily: https://chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza
Genocide is destroying millions of lives. Help the victims, be on the right side of history.
WTF FUCK FUCK FUCK There is absolutely no mercy. My sister cries all day long, her body is covered in sores, and she's become unable to move. When I asked the doctor for help, he told me the hospital pharmacy didn't have any free medication. My sister is still crying from the intense pain I urgently need to buy four boxes of smallpox medication for her. I trust you won't let her down.
I wish I could stop asking for help, but after my brother died of starvation, I found my life miserable and I'm living through the worst period of my life. I have no one but you, my friends, to save my sister.
This started appearing on my little sisterâs body, and I am deeply worried about her. Please keep her in your prayers and pray for her speedy recovery.
I finally get why so many furries are insistent on their 'ACAB' inclinations. I saw some guy on IG interview a bunch of people at a furry convention asking them what they do for a living and the amount of them that were feds or military was staggering.
This post is not a place for your no true scotsman argument. Go fuck yourself. No expensive hobby or sexual inclination makes you immune to being an imperialist. We're talking real life consequences for people here. Piss off.
FOR THOSE WHO CARE, THE TENTS AND CHILDREN ARE BEING HEAVILY BOMBED. THERE ARE AROUND 10 MARTYRS TODAY. WE ARE BEING EXTERMINATED, BUT IN EERIE SILENCE.
I'm trapped in a hospital bed, my body writhing in agony, while my younger siblings scream in terror outside. I hear the explosions and their cries over the phone, and I can do nothing to protect them. And what's worse, I've run out of my medications and painkillers. I hope you can stand by me and h@lp me bu.y them quickly so I can alleviate some of my pain and suffering. Please stand by me.
My chances of survival are diminishing every moment. My medication is almost gone, and my health is extremely poor. Please stand by me and h@lp me buy my medication urgently and h@lp me to travel to a safe country for my surgery. Please stand by me.
British Museum colludes with pro-Israel lobby to erase Palestine from historical exhibits
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An investigation by Middle East Eye has exposed the British Museum for covertly removing the terms âPalestine,â âPalestinian,â and âIsraeli occupationâ from its historical displays following intensive lobbying by pro-Israel activists. Internal emails obtained via a freedom of information request reveal that the London institution rapidly altered descriptions of artifacts dating back to 7,500 BCE to appease political pressure groups, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and high-profile figures.
While museum director Nick Cullinan publicly claimed the changes were part of a standard curation refresh and backed by audience testing, the newly released disclosures confirm that no visitor research regarding the term "Palestine" was ever conducted.
The internal correspondence details a frantic effort by museum staff to pacify complaints lodged between October and December 2024, with one directive explicitly ordering curators to remain hyper-conscious of the anniversary of 7 October. In one instance, a panel describing ancient rulers of âPalestinian descentâ was scrubbed and changed to âCanaanite originâ within five hours of receiving a complaint from the Board of Deputies.
Middle East Eye cross-referenced the redacted emails to identify key lobbyists, including right-wing commentators and historians who weaponized access to the museum's leadership to argue that historical references to an ancient Israelite occupation would stoke modern antisemitism.
The targeted erasure has sparked a severe diplomatic and cultural backlash, with Palestinian Ambassador to the UK Husam Zumlot accusing the public institution of betraying its historical integrity to serve political ends. Cultural figures and human rights defenders have condemned the museum for complicity in what the United Nations classifies as an ongoing genocide in Gaza, noting that the bureaucratic deletion of Palestinian history in London directly mirrors the physical destruction of heritage sites on the ground.
Despite photographic evidence showing that references to "modern Palestine" were replaced with "Gaza and the West Bank" at gallery entrances, the British Museum has refused to answer specific inquiries, issuing a blanket denial to Middle East Eye that any erasure took place.
ICE killed another person in maine today, just days after the murder of lorenzo salgado araujo in houston
the maine immigrants rights coalition has released a statement confirming he was a 26 year old columbian man who was authorized to work in the US and had a valid social security number
will update this post with a gofundme link if/when one becomes available
his name was joan sebastian guerrero. his 3 yr old daughter was in the backseat of the car in her bluey pajamas. after he was shot, witnesses saw ICE agents pull him from the car and cuff him as he died
If you canât donate to the gofundme for any reason, you may also consider supporting Presente, which supports Latin American and Afro-Latin people in Maine: https://www.presentemaine.org/
Presente! Maine
Or the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP): https://ilapmaine.org/
The fancy Redwinged Blackbird with potential bilateral gynandromorphism is still around, here are some more clips from the last couple of days. I have not edited them other than stringing them together for this video. This is how they were recorded. Every time I think it must be a molt, this bird turns around and looks completely like a female. So intriguing. It also has a lot of red on the face.
The male plumage suggests this bird is undergoing its very first molt into the adult male plumage but yeah, birds molt symmetrically. Both sides should be showing the young male plumage, not just one. This is a almost certainly a gynandromorph!!!
Edit: I also just noticed that you can see the right ('male') wing and leg are longer and thicker than the left ('female') side!! Male RWBL are usually a little bigger and heavier than the females so seeing this on the same bird is so cool!!
The Supreme Court of Nepal ruled in favour of same-sex marriage on 18 June 2026, requiring the government to ensure marriage equality.
As reported by Pahichan Media, human rights activist and former politician Sunil Babu Pant welcomed the ruling.
âThis landmark ruling marks a historic milestone for equality, dignity, and human rights in Nepal, while providing crucial legal clarity and protection for the rights of same-sex couples,â he said.
âThe verdict reaffirms the constitutional principles established in Sunil Babu Pant vs Nepal Govt, and strengthened through later cases, including Maya Surendraâs first-ever legal registration of non-traditional heterosexual marriage in Nepal,â Pant continued.
Bixonimania doesnât exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional ill
Key points:
the paper was obviously fake to a human reader: it starts by saying it's fake and says it multiple times throughout
the paper says it was funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob University of Trickery and thanks contributors from the USS Enterprise and the Fellowship of the Ring
the paper has already been erroneously cited in a real research paper
LLMs give different information depending on the prompt, so sometimes they mention that the fake condition is "perhaps pseudoscience" and sometimes they tell people to see a doctor because they have the fake condition
absolutely no one is taking any responsibility for this shit, except maybe Nature, because they retracted the paper that cited the fake paper
LLMs don't think. They can't analyse. They can only repeat and remix thoughtlessly.
wow. i know nature is a scam but requiring institutional access even for their ânewsâ section is just sad. hereâs the full article:
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real.
Bixonimania doesnât exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?
By Chris Stokel-Walker
Update: After publication of this article, on 10 April, the two preprints on bixonimania were taken down from the Preprints.org server.
Got sore, itchy eyes? Youâre 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.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesnât appear in the standard medical literature â because it doesnât exist. Itâs the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, 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 Thunström 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. âI wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,â 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 artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
Fabricating an illness
Bixonimania didnât exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. Then, on 26 April and 6 May that year, two preprints about the condition popped up on the academic social network SciProfiles (see https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/qzm5 and https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/qzm4). The lead author was a phoney researcher named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photograph was created with AI.
Osmanovic Thunström says the idea to invent Izgubljenovic and bixonimania came out of studies on how large language models work. When she teaches her students how AI systems formulate their âknowledgeâ, she shows them how the Common Crawl database, a giant trawl of the Internetâs contents, informs their outputs. She also shows students how prompt injection â giving an AI chatbot a prompt that shunts it outside of its safety guard rails â can manipulate the output.
Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it âsounded ridiculousâ, she says. âI wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania â thatâs a psychiatric term.â
If that wasnât sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California. One paperâs acknowledgements thank âProfessor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterpriseâ. Both papers say they were funded by âthe Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triadâ.
Even if readers didnât make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that âthis entire paper is made upâ and âFifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure groupâ.
Soon after Osmanovic Thunström first posted information about the phoney condition, it started showing up in the output of the most commonly used LLM chatbots. On 13 April 2024, Microsoft Bingâs Copilot was declaring that âBixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare conditionâ, and on the same day, Googleâs Gemini was informing users that âBixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue lightâ and advising people to visit an ophthalmologist. On 27 April 2024, the Perplexity AI answer engine outlined its prevalence â one in 90,000 individuals were affected â and that same month, OpenAIâs ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.
Such answers by LLMs have alarmed some experts. âIf the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they arenât capturing and filtering out chunks like these, weâre doomed,â says Alex Ruani, a doctoral researcher in health misinformation at University College London. âThis is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates.â
Ruani says that the details of the fake-disease experiment might seem silly, but thereâs a bigger, more fundamental issue. âIt looks funny, but hold on, we have a problem here,â she says.
Online misinformation isnât new; Google has long battled attempts to game its search rankings with fake or misleading content. The company and others have spent years refining algorithms to rank and filter the information that search engines present to users, but LLMs struggle with this.
Since the fake papers came out, some versions of major LLMs have become sophisticated enough to express suspicion about bixonimania. When asked about the condition on 11 March, 2026, for example, ChatGPT declared that the condition âis probably a made-up, fringe, or pseudoscientific labelâ. But a few days later, ChatGPT was less sceptical, saying: âBixonimania is a proposed new subtype of periorbital melanosis (dark circles around the eyes) thought to be associated with exposure to blue light from digital screens.â
In mid-March, Microsoft Copilot said that bixonimania âis not a widely recognized medical diagnosis yet, but several emerging papers and case reports discuss it as a benign, misdiagnosed condition linked to prolonged exposure to bluelight sources such as screensâ.
And in January this year, Perplexity was describing bixonimania as âan emerging termâ. When shown that response, a Perplexity spokesperson said: âPerplexityâs central advantage is accuracy. We donât claim to be 100% accurate, but we do claim to be the AI company most focused on accuracy.â
An OpenAI spokesperson said: âThe models that power todayâs version of ChatGPT are significantly better at providing safe, accurate medical information, and studies conducted before GPT-5 reflect capabilities that users would not encounter today.â
When asked about past responses from Gemini that treated bixonimania as a real condition, a Google spokesperson said such results reflected the performance of an earlier model. They added, âWe have always been transparent about the limitations of generative AI and provide in-app prompts to encourage users to double-check information. For sensitive matters such as medical advice, Gemini recommends users consult with qualified professionals.â
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Part of the problem is that AI models can offer wildly different results depending on exactly what is asked and what kind of information they are drawing on. Search for âbixonimaniaâ, and Googleâs AI overview might treat it as a legitimate condition. Ask it âIs bixonimania real?â and the same AI overview might confirm that it isnât legitimate.
Mahmud Omar, a physician and researcher specializing in the applications of AI in health care at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, says the speed at which AI firms are rolling out new models makes it difficult to reach âa pipeline, a consensus or a methodology to automatically test each modelâ.
The format of the fake-disease experiment â and the way the results pretended to be from an official source, namely an academic paper, might have been a key factor in its success. In a separate study of 20 LLMs, Omar found that LLMs are more prone to hallucinate and elaborate on misinformation when the text theyâre processing looks professionally medical â formatted like a hospital discharge note or clinical paper â than when it comes from social-media posts (M. Omar et al. Lancet Digit. Health 8, 100949; 2026). âWhen the text looks professional and written as a doctor writes, thereâs an increase in the hallucination rates,â says Omar.
The experimentâs reach has now spread into the published medical literature. The bixonimania research has been cited by a handful of researchers, including a study that appeared in Cureus, a journal published by Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature, by researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Mullana, India (S. Banchhor et al. Cureus 16, e74625 (2024); retraction 18, r223 (2026)). (Natureâs news team is editorially independent of its publisher.) That study cites one of the fake preprints and says: âBixonimania is an emerging form of POM [periorbital melanosis] linked to blue light exposure; further research on the mechanism is underway.â
The corresponding author did not respond to a request for comment on this story. After Nature contacted Cureus to ask for comment, the journal retracted the paper on 30 March. The retraction notice says: âThis article has been retracted by the Editor-in-Chief due to the presence of three irrelevant references, including one reference to a fictitious disease. As a result, the journalâs editorial staff no longer has confidence in the accuracy or provenance of the work, thus requiring retraction. The authors disagree with the decision to retract.â
Ruani says the problem goes beyond LLMs because the bixonimania experiment also hoodwinked humans who cited the fake research. âWe need to protect our trust like gold,â she says. âItâs a mess right now.â
Experimental concerns
Osmanovic Thunström had reservations while developing her experiment; she worried about the risks of seeding a fake illness into the scientific literature. So she contacted an ethics adviser to assess concerns about the work, and picked a comparatively low-stakes condition to limit the impact. âI wanted to make sure that weâre not creating more harm than good through demonstrating it in this way,â she says.
That adviser, David Sundemo, a physician who conducts research on AI in health care at the University of Gothenburg, says that decision was finely balanced. âI think itâs very valuable work, but itâs also kind of controversial in some ways, especially when it comes to displaying this false information,â he says. âFrom my perspective, itâs worth the ethical cost of planting false information in this regard,â Sundemo says.
But even with those checks, the experiment sits uncomfortably with some researchers. âIt does seem to me that theyâve generated a form of misinformation,â says Glenn Cohen at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who specializes in the intersection of medical ethics and law. However, he still says he thinks it is a âgreat studyâ and âtracking results is goodâ.
For her part, Osmanovic Thunström is torn over what to do about the two fake papers, and will be discussing this with other researchers. âIf retracted, it might be hard for others to find the source and verify our path,â she says. âIf left, it will continue to be recalled in searches.â The question she feels she has to tackle is whether leaving the preprints out there does more harm than the good it does by demonstrating the potential issues of AI.
The bixonimania experiment is a fresh spin on a bigger issue â the poisoning of AI systems by people who manipulate the academic literature. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and research-integrity sleuth, notes that researchers have created fake books and papers to inflate their citation counts on Google ScholarâŻâ thereby exploiting the same automated indexing systems that feed into LLM training data. The worry is that the more fake content is fed into AI models, the more likely those AI models are to regurgitate the fake information, spooling us further away from facts and reality. âItâs all automated, so thereâs very little chance of a human interfering and taking out fake information,â she says.
It is particularly dangerous when fabricated information seeps into medical guidance from LLMs, says Bik. âThat can be very harmful.â And as more AI companies roll out health-focused products â OpenAI released ChatGPT Health in January, for example â the potential damage resulting from anything going wrong increases, some researchers told Nature.
OpenAI challenges that view. âChatGPT Health is powered by our latest models which offer the highest performance in real-world health use, stronger clinical reasoning, fewer factual errors, and improved performance on evaluations,â an OpenAI spokesperson says. They add that Osmanovic Thunströmâs outcomes âreflect capabilities that users would not encounter today in ChatGPT or ChatGPT Healthâ.
But among some researchers, thereâs a growing scepticism about the abilities of AI models in medicine. When asked about this kind of usage, Cohen said: âThere are open questions about how much trust it deserves, especially as to application-specific questions.â
AIâs uncritical tendency to suck up information, often without verifying its accuracy, means there is a risk we could see an âinformation asymmetryâ, says Jennifer Byrne, a molecular oncologist and research-integrity sleuth at the University of Sydney in Australia. A single corrective paper about cancer research, for example, can be overwhelmed by hundreds of papers repeating a false claim, she says. âChatGPT is pretty confident to fill in the gaps and give people all kinds of information about where that cell line came from, the patient from which it originated, how itâs been used in the literature, its research utility and so on,â she says.
And if LLMs can be poisoned, âthis is something thatâs concerning for us,â says Byrne.
Another concern is that models could be gamed â potentially for commercial benefit. Osmanovic Thunström says that a bad actor could exploit the same technique she used, for profit. âWhat if I was a salesman of blue-light glasses and I wanted to use this as an argument?â she says. A would-be salesperson could say, âYou can just talk to ChatGPT, and theyâll tell you this is a problem. You can avoid it with these really expensive glasses,â she suggests.
One way to tackle this would be to have an automated, open-access evaluation pipeline â a standardized battery of tests that every consumer-facing health model would have to pass before deployment, checking not just for hallucinations but also for susceptibility to misinformation, socio-demographic biases and other pressure points. âWe should evaluate it and have a pipeline for continuous evaluation,â says Omar.
Time is of the essence, because Byrne is concerned that the issue identified by Osmanovic Thunström might just be the tip of the iceberg. âIt is worrying when these major claims are just passing through the literature unchallenged, or passing through peer review unchallenged,â she says. âI think thereâs a probably a lot of other issues that havenât been uncovered.â
Thatâs something that worries other experts, too, as AI becomes the norm in all areas of our lives, including how people think about their health. âWe and our health shouldnât be the beta testers for companies,â says Cohen.
