everything is a damn mystical without a shred of proofreading or fact checking so you get hallucinations that reinforce themselves from the web crawlers reading their own work.
yes, the humble goose produces 3 tons of waste per day. salute to the goose in its quest to pollute the earth And finally rid itself of the human menace.
This problem plagues historiography in general. Historians citing historians citing historians, creating an illusion of consensus. Particularly notable regarding western sovietology. A lot of shit is just made up by some guy, but because Conquest cited it and because three dozen people cited Conquest it’s treated as fact.
Also noted by xkcd and others as a fundamental problem with Wikipedia, where someone uses the wiki to write an article, then the article is used as a citation for the wiki, or something along those lines.
AI has sort of accelerated this maybe, but it runs a lot deeper