America gets a health report contaminated by AI nonsense

But what else would you expect from Trump and RFK Jr?

I keep reading that artificial intelligence holds great promise for the future. Maybe. At the moment, my impression is that artificial intelligence bears the same relationship to actual intelligence that reality television bears to reality.

Ask AI for a report on a complex issue and it’s apt to present reliable information, unreliable information and stuff it simply made up on its own. No kidding. AI hallucinates.

Of course, none of this stopped the Trump administration from releasing a report on improving the nation’s health that has now been revealed to rely to a dismaying extent on AI.

How do we know? Well, journalists employing human intelligence read the footnotes of the “Make America Healthy Again” report and found studies attributed to the wrong authors, studies that don’t exist, links that don’t work and telltale signs that bots had simply been sent out to scrape the web for whatever they could find on the topic — factual or not.

Of course, none of this would bother Donald Trump, who spreads misinformation the way mosquitoes spread malaria, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services whose own scientific hallucinations are well-documented.

The White House responded to the AI revelations by saying it was just a formatting problem, nothing to worry about.

Oh, by the way, the point of the report, known as MAHA, was to recommend ways to improve the declining health of America’s children. You’d think if any topic would merit rigorous scholarship, it would be that one. But Trump’s people, having already hobbled so many government agencies that protect health, were OK with taking shortcuts.

Well, if that’s all the effort they’re willing to put into a vital topic, what should we expect from future government reports?

Are we going to get an AI-generated recommendations on eliminating poverty in America that include sober analyses of economic data, sermon quotes from Joel Osteen and snatches of song lyrics from Annie?

Should we brace ourselves for a report on the readiness of our armed forces that recommends better coordination between the Army and Navy and wider deployment of light sabers?

Will the administration release a white paper that proposes to solve the housing crisis by loosening regulations, offering tax incentives and advising young homeless women to move in with the Seven Dwarfs?

It’s not just the sloppiness of the MAHA report that amazes me. It’s the arrogance and cluelessness. What kind of leaders think it’s OK to cheat on a national health report like a couple of college sophomores plagiarizing a term paper?

The kind that aren’t really interested in our welfare.

The kind that think we won’t notice and won’t care if we do.

The kind that, alas, run our country.