RFK Jr.’s Answer to US Health Crisis Is Citations Made Up by AI
The White House’s keystone health report outlining its agenda for Americans’ health is riddled with artificial intelligence “hallucinations,” with fabricated citations and broken links reflective of the administration’s embrace of non-scientific approaches to public health.
An analysis by The Washington Post uncovered numerous citations in the “Make America Healthy Again” report with the letters “oaicite” attached to the URLs — a marker indicating that they were collected using artificial intelligence created by OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and NOTUS uncovered numerous citations within the report, spearheaded by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that were totally fabricated. This lines up with the tendency of AI technology like ChatGPT to “hallucinate” information — a common and growing problem fueling the spread of disinformation online and among the public.
Experts say relying on AI for a factual report that has serious implications for people’s health and lives is dangerous, as AI does not “know” objective truths and is subject to manipulation by its programmers. And yet, this document marks the administration’s approach to the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of Americans and their children.
“The problem with current AI is that it’s not trustworthy, so it’s just based on statistical associations and dependencies,” Steven Piantadosi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Post. “It has no notion of ground truth, no notion of … a rigorous logical or statistical argument. It has no notions of evidence and how strongly to weigh one kind of evidence versus another.”
“This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,” Georges C. Benjamin, who heads the American Public Health Association, told the Post. “It cannot be used for any policymaking. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can’t believe what’s in it.”
The Trump administration chalked up the fake citations to “formatting issues,” which would not explain fabricated citations and AI markers. The administration subsequently uploaded a version of the document with some of the fake citations replaced.
It’s ironic that the administration would decry traditional methods of scientific research and tout the “gold-standard” work that the administration will do instead in a document that couldn’t even accomplish the most basic fact checking and citation tasks required for quality research.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” said Ivan Oransky, who co-founded a website that tracks study retractions, per The New York Times. “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this.”
It’s also ironic that Kennedy threatened this week to bar government-funded scientists from publishing in major medical journals while using research published in those very journals to bolster his points in the MAHA report.
The report itself, experts have said, is full of disinformation, often making statements not supported by the sources it cites. It strategically omits certain explanations for poor health outcomes in the U.S. — like COVID-19, the lack of universal health care, or the fact that the leading cause of death for children is gun violence — while failing to mention legitimate solutions for others. It also cherry-picks evidence, like rising rates of mental disorders among children, while failing to note that clinicians are becoming better at recognizing and diagnosing such disorders.
Meanwhile, some of the report’s recommendations are flatly hypocritical. For instance, under its section about the spread of ultra-processed foods, the report touts the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, for its “proven track record of improving children’s health.”
However, the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to social programs via Republicans’ reconciliation bill are slated to negatively impact enrollment in WIC, jeopardizing benefits used by millions of pregnant, postpartum, newborn and child beneficiaries to access healthy, fresh foods.