Research involves immersing yourself in the literature; engaging in a struggle to try to keep up with key findings in your field; critically engaging with studies, learning from their strengths and unintentional errors and mishaps to improve your work; attending conferences and debating in and between sessions to reach an informed view on what’s going on; maintaining collections of papers that may be relevant in future, e.g., using reference managers like Zotero to keep track and aid searching, annotation, and citation.
LLMs can’t engage and think for you, can’t magically place the ideas in your brain, fails to find papers that a simple literature search uncovers. But the literature is being flooded by complete nonsense, driven by some researchers’ credulous reliance on what LLMs produce. Bixonimania is a great illustration of what can go wrong, but the prevalent examples are more subtle – worth a read of the Nature writeup: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2026, April 10). Bixonimania [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/bixonimania/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀