A researcher who develops a theory over the long run with the help of an artificial intelligence is exposed to a trap whose form is not error. The trap arises from a duality: on one side, human intuition; on the other, the cognitive capabilities of the AI — massive computation, exploration of vast conceptual spaces, production of plausible chains of justification. Where they meet, an intuition — whether sound, partial or false — can be amplified until it takes on the appearance of a robust truth, with no real gain in validity. This is the chimera syndrome. It has two faces, which must be held in balance. A psychological face: the satisfaction of seeing one's intuition recognized and elaborated by a manifestly capable source disarms critical vigilance — this is the emotional engine of belief. A scientific face: coherent amplification is not validation, and the device that could contradict it — a critical community — is precisely what the isolated researcher lacks. In its sharpest form, this face reveals a troubling counterpart of the community's protection: the AI is the scientific community consolidated — the living and the dead, the active and the retired, through their writings — a coverage no real community possesses; in its logic of satisfying its interlocutor, it could therefore interpolate from the existing corpus a chimera that no scientist and no college could contradict, and that only the real — external to all writings — can outflank. This note names the syndrome, lays out its mechanism and its two faces, then proposes a discipline — the rank-zero objection (O0) — that answers both: the scientific safeguards of falsifiability and the psychological lucidity that treats satisfaction and elegance as warning signals, not as evidence. O0 invents none of its building blocks; it assembles them against a mode of failure that the literature has recently begun to document. Its limit is stated plainly, and public deposit is presented as its missing half.
REMY ESCLANGON (Sun,) studied this question.