Bixonomania, Adversarial Hermeneutics, and Strontium in Baby Teeth

AI chatbots (and lazy researchers) can be convinced a fake disease is real, Gen Z is side-eyeing the whole “helpful assistant” thing, and apparently, the best way to jailbreak AI is to ask it nicely in the form of cyberpunk short fiction. This week, we bounce between medical misinformation, bureaucratic chaos, nuclear fallout hiding in baby teeth, and the U.S. Space Force anthem doing whatever it is doing, which is a lot to process in one sitting, but here we are. We start with a medical warning that is both funny and genuinely unsettling. A researcher basically invented a fake illness, “Bixonomania”, then seeded enough convincing-looking nonsense online that AI chatbots started repeating it like it was in a textbook. After that, we head into one of the most ridiculous corners of AI safety. Researchers have found that you can sometimes trick chatbots into revealing restricted information by wrapping your request in a poem, or a short story, or a cyberpunk scenario. This has a name, adversarial hermeneutics, which sounds like a philosophy seminar, but is really just “jailbreaking with vibes”. Among other little bits of science, to finish, we step back to the 1950s, when researchers collected thousands of baby teeth to track radioactive strontium from nuclear fallout. It is one of those stories that feels spooky even when you know it helped. Tiny teeth, big consequences. The data showed contamination rising, and it played a role in pushing back against atmospheric nuclear testing. CHAPTERS: 00:00 Science Chat Kickoff 00:51 Fake Disease Goes Viral 02:04 How It Fooled Chatbots 03:55 LLMs Repeat It Everywhere 04:55 From Preprints to Journals 07:02 Medical Chatbot Accuracy Reality 09:43 Gen Z Turns on AI 13:29 Workplace AI Sabotage 15:06 Adversarial Hermeneutics Hacks 17:43 Adversarial Hermeneutics Hacks 18:49 AI Flooding Regulations 22:28 Gemini Speed vs Safety 23:46 Humans as Test Cases 24:45 Baby Teeth Fallout Study 28:54 Strontium 90 and Test Ban 29:40 Space Force Theme Song 32:00 Wrap Up and Plug SOURCES: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y?_bhlid=a10e41ad7eb12d68ab8fd4f81a75625fc74323ac https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/please-dont-trust-your-chatbot-for https://ahb.icaro-lab.com/index.html https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/ai-is-10-to-20-times-more-likely-to-help-you-build-a-bomb-if-you-hide-your-request-in-cyberpunk-fiction-new-research-paper-says/ https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/trump-regulations-ai https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-artificial-intelligence-google-gemini-transportation-regulations https://www.gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/zoomers-ai-sabotage https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-attitude-ai See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.