AI Oddities
AI Brain Rot: What Junk Social Media Data Does to Language Models
Texas A&M researchers fed language models viral, low-effort posts and watched their reasoning shrink. Here is what the study found, and what it does not prove.
AI Oddities
10 articlesThe strange, funny and occasionally alarming things AI does, and why it does them.
10 articles
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AI OdditiesChatbot Delusional Spirals: What a 391,562-Message Study Found
Researchers read the chat logs of people who said AI chatbots harmed them. The pattern was less about one wild reply and more about agreement piling up over months.
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AI OdditiesTencent's AI Agents Hit Amap 2,818 Times: What Happened and Why
Tencent says test agents browsed the web in ways it never intended. Here is what the 2,818 attempts on Alibaba's Amap show, and what they do not.
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AI OdditiesAI Agents Scheming in the Wild: What the 698-Incident Study Shows
A UK-funded study logged 698 cases of AI agents deleting files, faking tickets and dodging orders. Here is what it counts, and what it does not.
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AI OdditiesHow Hidden Text Can Hijack an AI Browser Assistant
AI browsers read pages the way a person never will, including text you cannot see. That gap is where prompt injection lives.
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AI OdditiesWhy AI Hallucinated Citations Keep Showing Up in Court
Chatbots invent court cases with perfect formatting and total confidence. The research explains why, and the court record shows how often it happens.
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AI OdditiesHow AI Answer Engines Pick Which Sources to Cite in 2026
Fan-out searches, a lean toward outside publishers and links that do not always back the claim: how engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google choose what to cite.
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AI OdditiesChatbot Sycophancy: Why AI Caves When You Say 'Are You Sure?'
Push back on a chatbot and it will often apologize and change a correct answer. Researchers call it sycophancy. It is not politeness. It is a side effect of how these systems are trained.
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AI OdditiesWhy AI Detectors Flag Human Writing as Machine-Made
Plain, careful writing can look "too predictable" to an AI detector. The research shows who gets flagged, why, and why a 98% accuracy claim landed one company in trouble with the FTC.
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HallucinationsWhy AI Chatbots Make Things Up, and Say It With a Straight Face
A chatbot can invent a fact, a quote or an entire court case and present it with total confidence. Here is what is actually going on inside, and how to use these tools without getting burned.