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False citations: Did Trump admin use AI for MAHA report on US child health?
The report produced by the Make America Healthy Again Commission, named after the slogan aligned with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was released last week. The 14-member commission included Kennedy, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Food and Drug Administration head Martin Makary among others read more
A highly-publicized U.S. government report on the health of American children referenced scientific studies that did not exist among citations to support its conclusions in what the White House said were 'formatting issues' on Thursday.
The report produced by the Make America Healthy Again Commission, named after the slogan aligned with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was released last week. The 14-member commission included Kennedy, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Food and Drug Administration head Martin Makary among others.
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It said processed food, chemicals, stress and overprescription of medications and vaccines may be factors behind chronic illness in American children, citing some 500 research studies, including those that did not exist, as evidence.
Digital news outlet NOTUS reported the citation errors on Thursday. It found seven studies listed in the report's footnotes that did not exist, along with broken links and misstated conclusions, raising questions over whether the report had relied on artificial intelligence. Reuters independently confirmed two of the erroneous citations.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters that any citation errors were due to 'formatting issues.' The government said it posted a corrected version of the report later on Thursday, without providing details on how the mistakes had occurred.
'The substance of the MAHA report remains the same - a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation's children,' the Department of Health and Human Services said.
Kennedy has spent decades sowing doubt about the safety of vaccines, which have long been backed by a scientific consensus on their effectiveness for controlling disease outbreaks, raising concerns within the scientific and medical communities over the policies he would pursue as health secretary.
Since taking the role, he has fired thousands of workers at federal health agencies and cut billions of dollars from U.S. biomedical research spending.
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'Nobody has ever accused RFK Jr. of academic rigor,' said Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. 'The speed (of the MAHA report) suggests that it could not have been vetted carefully and must have been whisked through standard clearance procedures. The citation problem suggests a reliance on AI.'
AI-generated fictions, known as 'hallucinations,' have also cropped up in court filings and landed attorneys in hot water ever since ChatGPT and other generative AI programs became widely available more than two years ago.
Katherine Keyes, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, was cited in the MAHA report as the author of 'Changes in mental health and substance use among U.S. adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,' which the report said was published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.
She said that neither she nor the named co-authors of the paper had written it. 'It does make me concerned given that citation practices are an important part of conducting and reporting rigorous science,' she said.
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Psychiatry Professor Robert L. Findling did not author the article cited in the report as 'Direct-to-consumer advertising of psychotropic medications for youth: A growing concern' in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, according to a spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, where Findling is a professor.
The studies attributed to Findling and Keyes no longer appeared in the MAHA report on the White House website as of Thursday evening.
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