The AI Slop Scandal Around the MAHA Report Is Getting Worse
It came to light this week that a new government report from the "Make America Healthy Again" Commission led by Robert F Kennedy Jr. contained botched citations for scientific papers that didn't exist. This is almost certainly a sign that some form of generative AI was involved to draft a very consequential piece of medical agenda-setting coming out of the US's top health agency. Now, some additional reporting suggests that the paper's flaws go even deeper — yes, even deeper than allegedly relying on a technology known for making up stuff and then being surprised that it made up stuff. […]
It came to light this week that a new government report from the "Make America Healthy Again" Commission led by Robert F Kennedy Jr. contained botched citations for scientific papers that didn't exist. This is almost certainly a sign that some form of generative AI was involved to draft a very consequential piece of medical agenda-setting, coming out of the US's top health agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
Now, some additional reporting suggests that the paper's flaws go even deeper — yes, even deeper than allegedly relying on a technology known for making stuff up and then being surprised that it made stuff up.
But first, let's highlight how the White House finally decided to respond to the criticism of the report, which has been "very poorly and not convincingly at all."
On Thursday, the White House said that it would fix the errors in the government report — and it did, releasing a new version with corrected citations. But press secretary Karoline Leavitt also took the opportunity to construe the affair as the press getting worked up about a few errant typos.
"I understand there was some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated," Leavitt told reporters during a press briefing, as quoted by the Associated Press. "But it does not negate the substance of the report."
"Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected," HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told the AP in a statement.
Led by noted anti-vaxxer and all-around crackpot RKF Jr., the "MAHA Report" purports to be a tell-all on why Americans, and especially children, are so unhealthy. Both Leavitt and Nixon described the report as "transformative."
That's a questionable claim. As NOTUS first reported on Thursday, several of the studies cited in the report do not exist at all, including one called "Overprescribing of Oral Corticosteroids for Children With Asthma," which was used to argue that doctors are giving kids too much medicine. This "study" has never been referenced anywhere outside the MAHA report. Lawyers have been sanctioned for similar behavior in court.
It gets dumber. The Washington Post found that 37 of the paper's 522 footnotes are inexplicably repeated multiple times. Some of the citations also include an "oaicite" appended to the URLs, which refers to OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. This is a "definitive sign" that the research was gathered using an AI, WaPo concluded.
And the flaws go beyond bogus citations, or "minor" perils of "formatting," in Leavitt's parlance. As experts told the NYT, some of the papers that were correctly cited were still inaccurately summarized — if in fact they weren't being deliberately misconstrued. The report argued, in one case, that a 40-fold increase in bipolar disorder and ADHD diagnoses in children between 1994 to 2003 was propelled by loosened criteria in a fifth edition of a guide used by psychiatrists, per the NYT. But that fifth edition, it turns out, didn't come out until 2013. And that "40-fold increase" the report touted appears to come from a 2007 study which makes zero mention of an uptick in ADHD.
Even if you could somehow excuse using an AI chatbot to help speed up composing what's supposed to be the cynosure of the US's public health policy going forward, the sheer levels of sloppiness on display can only leave you to conclude that either RFK and his lackeys have no idea what they're doing and have no business writing a serious scientific document, or that they're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public, cynical enough to ask an AI model to conjure up studies to fit whatever narrative they're peddling.
"This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point," Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told WaPo. "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."
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