The origin wasn't just other cows. It was ground remains of other animals including sheep with scrapie and zoo animals imported from abroad.

In any case, the cows got fed with the weirdest stuff.

We'll soon have the "Mad AI's Disease". Though with the current level of hallucinations some LLMs have they are already half way there.

Even before 2022 I suspect a lot of the content they trained on was already generated by cruder forms of AI anyway so maybe it was born to diseased.

Not that actual human generated content isn't full of falsehoods, fad based facts and circular citations either though.

I vote for "Mad Minsky Disease"

But that wasn't a scare. It's a real thing that made people ill with no cure.

Memory is feeble, but I remember it being a scare. People were genuinely worried about it; mostly because it was a real thing that potentially threatened them.

This doesn't seem like a scare. If GPT and the like start outputting increasingly nonsensical outputs (which, a lot of the time, that is the case already) due to tainted inputs, oh well?

Quicksand is also a real and dangerous thing, but the media is not always proportionate in reporting the risks.

I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t a real thing. (I’m not a native English speaker so I’m probably missing a nuance of “scare” beyond what appears to be its literal meaning of the general public being afraid.)

"scare" in English is often used to describe a public over-reaction to a perceived threat. In the US we had the "red scare" that was an over reaction to communists in the US.

A similar concept is the "satanic panic", the idea that all our children were being abducted by satanic cults.

Although it sounds strange but in reinforcement learning there are approaches where actors learn on real world sensory input and then do a couple of rounds of internal simulations to refine the parameters. Then, this is tested against real worlds. I remember that this outperformed algorithms without such simulations.

Also dreaming found in humans and other animals seems like this.