MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI

[struggle4progress]

The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.

May 29, 2025 at 8:47 p.m. EDTYesterday at 8:47 p.m. EDT

By Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.

Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.

Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/05/29/maha-rfk-jr-ai-garble/

[BootinUp]

1. Does OpenAI think smoking is bad for me?

just curious.

[struggle4progress]

4. What it "thinks" could depend on how you use it

[BootinUp]

5. So how does it think I should use it?

[struggle4progress]

2. White House blames 'formatting' for errors

Adrianna Rodriguez
Ken Alltucker
USA TODAY

Citation errors and phantom research used as scientific evidence to bolster Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s landmark “Make America Healthy Again” commission report were apparently due to “formatting issues,” according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt ...

“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated,” Leavitt told reporters May 29. “But it does not negate the substance of the report.”

She also didn't say whether the report was generated by artificial intelligence, or AI, as some have questioned ...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/29/rfk-jr-maha-report-citation-errors/83925319007/

[getagrip_already]

6. Can you negate what isn't there?

Leavitt told reporters May 29. “But it does not negate the substance of the report.”

[struggle4progress]

3. Premade Conclusions, Post-Hoc Data

By Jeffrey A. Singer, Terence Kealey, and Bautista Vivanco

... The president’s executive order gave the Commission 100 days to develop a strategy. One hundred days! Why so long? Surely, a policy analysis on such a complex and nuanced issue with myriad complicating factors could be produced over a weekend. Particularly as, of the 14 MAHA commissioners, only two (Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary) have medical or scientific backgrounds. The rest are mostly lawyers, all are political appointees, and everybody knows that a group of politically appointed lawyers is just the ticket for investigating matters of medical science ...

Oddly, however, the data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions. For example, the first sentence of the introduction reads: “Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries—and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.” But the graph the Commission supplies shows that, dating back to 1970, the US has always ranked last in life expectancy among comparator nations. Were Americans back in 1970 dying sooner than Canadians, Europeans, or the Japanese because of ultra-processed food, smartphones, chemicals, a lack of exercise, stress levels, a lack of sleep, and overmedicalization? Probably not.

The reason for the US’s poor medical performance lies in the culture that gave us pellagra, which includes the nation’s unusually high level of social inequality for a rich country, regulatory barriers to access to health care, its extraordinarily high levels of road traffic deaths (which are today seven times higher in the US than in Sweden, say), its unusually high levels of gun deaths (which are today 340 times higher in the US than the UK for example), its extraordinarily high incarceration rate (prisoners may die from natural causes 20 years earlier than the general population), and other obvious social factors—which is why Mississippi has a life expectancy 8 years lower than states like Hawaii or Washington ...

https://www.cato.org/blog/premade-conclusions-post-hoc-data-problem-maha-report

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

7. AI is probably smarter than Bobby Brainworm or the TACO man