not exactly surprising that we are hearing more stories/examples of AI induced delusions in people, but it really makes me wonder if there was a concerted effort to kill news stories related to AI doubling down when incorrect.

No AI(LLMs) just got better, more accurately they got better at detecting they are incorrect and correcting themselves.

If you want to sort of grasp how it works, just search up the Chatgpt seahorse emoji debacle, arguably the best example of what happens when deep training data fights with the self-check logic.