Latest news with #MAHAReport
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
Why Trump's push for ‘gold-standard science' has researchers alarmed
A new term keeps popping up in messages from Trump administration scientific agencies — a pledge to restore 'gold-standard science.' Many scientists say the opposite is happening. The administration's 'MAHA Report,' intended to diagnose the root cause of poor health in American children, was written by Cabinet officials and political appointees, most of whom lack scientific and medical expertise. It included numerous errors, such as garbled references and invented studies. Thousands of grants that went through expert peer review have been terminated because they conflict with political priorities. The administration is proposing to reclassify government officials involved in grantmaking to 'increase career employee accountability,' which critics see as a way to inject politics into science.
Yomiuri Shimbun
2 days ago
- Health
- Yomiuri Shimbun
White House MAHA Report May Have Garbled Science by Using AI, Experts Say
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a Make America Healthy Again Commission event at the White House on May 22. 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. A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate -as well as the tendency to 'hallucinate' studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real. AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report. 'Frankly, that's shoddy work,' he said. 'We deserve better.' 'The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,' which addressed the root causes of America's lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump. It blames exposure to environmental toxins, poor nutrition and increased screen time for a decline in Americans' life expectancy. Outcry was swift following The Post's report. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) said the administration's potential use of AI to influence policy was dangerous. 'These people are unserious – but they pose a serious risk to Americans' health,' he wrote in a social media post. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said in a statement, 'It's shameful that American parents even have to think about fake science and AI-generated studies in official White House reports on their kids' health.' The entire episode is a 'cautionary tale' for the potential use of AI in government, said Anand Parekh, chief medical adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank. 'Did they not have enough staff?' he asked Friday. 'What are the checks?' One reference in the initial version of the report cited a study titled 'Overprescribing of Oral Corticosteroids for Children With Asthma' to buttress the idea that children are overmedicated. But that study didn't appear to exist. There is a similar Pediatrics article from 2017 with the same first author but different co-authors. Later Thursday, that Pediatrics article was swapped in for the apparently nonexistent study in the version of the report available online. An article credited to U.S. News & World Report about children's recess and exercise time was initially cited twice to support claims of declining physical activity among U.S. children, once with only part of the link shown. It listed Mlynek, A. and Spiegel, S. as different authors. Neither referred to Kate Rix, who wrote the story. Neither Mlynek nor Spiegel appear to be actual reporters for the publication. As of Thursday evening, Rix had been swapped in as the author on one of the references in the version of the report available online. Nearly half of the 522 citations in the initial version of the report included links to articles or studies. But a Post analysis of all the report's references found that at least 21 of those links were dead. Former governor and current New York City mayoral front-runner Andrew M. Cuomo was caught up in controversy last month after a housing policy report he issued used ChatGPT and garbled a reference. Attorneys have faced sanctions for using nonexistent case citations created by ChatGPT in legal briefs. The garbled scientific citations betray subpar science and undermine the credibility of the report, said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. 'This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,' he said. '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.' When asked about the nonexistent citations at a news briefing Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the White House has 'complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS.' 'I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA Report that are being addressed, and the report will be updated, but it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government,' Leavitt said. At some point between 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. Thursday, the MAHA Report file was updated on the White House site to remove mentions of 'corrected hyperlinks' and one of the 'oaicite' markers. Another 'oaicite' marker, attached to a New York Times Wirecutter story about baby formula, was still present in the document until it was removed Thursday evening. The White House continued to update the report into the night. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said that 'minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but 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.' 'Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, our federal government is no longer ignoring this crisis, and it's time for the media to also focus on what matters,' Nixon said. Kennedy has long vowed to use AI to make America's health care better and more efficient, recently stating in a congressional hearing that he had even seen an AI nurse prototype 'that could revolutionize health delivery in rural areas.' Peter Lurie, president of the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, said he was not surprised by the presence of possible AI markers in the report. Lurie said he had asked his own staff to look into it after noticing that the report linked to one of his organization's fact sheets but credited the Department of Agriculture and HHS as the authors. 'The idea that they would envelop themselves in the shroud of scientific excellence while producing a report that relies heavily on AI is just shockingly hypocritical,' said Lurie, who was a top Food and Drug Administration official in the Obama administration, where he wrote such government reports. There are many pitfalls in modern AI, which is 'happy to make up citations,' said Steven Piantadosi, a professor in psychology and neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. 'The problem with current AI is that it's not trustworthy, so it's just based on statistical associations and dependencies,' he said. '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. ' The Post previously reported that the document stretched the boundaries of science with some of its conclusions. Several sections offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
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, 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." More on AI: This Sleazy GLP-1 Prescription Site Is Using Deepfaked "Before-and-After" Photos of Fake Patients, and Running Ads Showing AI-Generated Ozempic Boxes
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say
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 Washington 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. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. 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. A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate -as well as the tendency to 'hallucinate' studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real. AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report. 'Frankly, that's shoddy work,' he said. 'We deserve better.' 'The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,' which addressed the root causes of America's lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump. It blames exposure to environmental toxins, poor nutrition and increased screen time for a decline in Americans' life expectancy. One reference in the initial version of the report cited a study entitled 'Overprescribing of Oral Corticosteroids for Children With Asthma' to buttress the idea that children are over-medicated. But that study didn't appear to exist. There is a similar Pediatrics article from 2017 with the same first author but different co-authors. Later Thursday, that Pediatrics article was swapped in for the apparently nonexistent study in the version of the report available online. An article credited to U.S. News & World Report about children's recess and exercise time was initially cited twice to support claims of declining physical activity among U.S. children, once with only part of the link shown. It listed Mlynek, A. and Spiegel, S. as different authors. Neither referred to Kate Rix, who wrote the story. Neither Mlynek nor Spiegel appear to be actual reporters for the publication. As of Thursday evening, Rix had been swapped in as the author on one of the references in the version of the report available online. Nearly half of the 522 citations in the initial version of the report included links to articles or studies. But a Post analysis of all the report's references found that at least 21 of those links were dead. Former governor and current New York City mayoral front-runner Andrew Cuomo was caught up in controversy last month after a housing policy report he issued used ChatGPT and garbled a reference. Attorneys have faced sanctions for using nonexistent case citations created by ChatGPT in legal briefs. The garbled scientific citations betray subpar science and undermine the credibility of the report, said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. 'This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,' he said. '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.' When asked about the nonexistent citations at a news briefing Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the White House has 'complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS.' 'I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA Report that are being addressed, and the report will be updated, but it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government,' Leavitt said. At some point between 1 and 2:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, the MAHA Report file was updated on the White House site to remove mentions of 'corrected hyperlinks' and one of the 'oaicite' markers. Another 'oaicite' marker, attached to a New York Times Wirecutter story about baby formula, was still present in the document until it was removed Thursday evening. The White House continued to update the report into the night. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said that 'minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but 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.' 'Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, our federal government is no longer ignoring this crisis, and it's time for the media to also focus on what matters,' Nixon said. Kennedy has long vowed to use AI to make America's health care better and more efficient, recently stating in a congressional hearing that he had even seen an AI nurse prototype 'that could revolutionize health delivery in rural areas.' Peter Lurie, president of the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, said he was not surprised by the presence of possible AI markers in the report. Lurie said he had asked his own staff to look into it after noticing that the report linked to one of his organization's fact sheets but credited the Department of Agriculture and HHS as the authors. 'The idea that they would envelop themselves in the shroud of scientific excellence while producing a report that relies heavily on AI is just shockingly hypocritical,' said Lurie, who was a top Food and Drug Administration official in the Obama administration, where he wrote such government reports. There are many pitfalls in modern AI, which is 'happy to make up citations,' said Steven Piantadosi, a professor in psychology and neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. 'The problem with current AI is that it's not trustworthy, so it's just based on statistical associations and dependencies,' he said. '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. ' The Post previously reported that the document stretched the boundaries of science with some of its conclusions. Several sections offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers. Related Content Harvard celebrates graduation in the shadow of its fight with Trump Columbia protester Mahmoud Khalil's detention ruled likely unconstitutional Despite ceasefire, India and Pakistan are locked in a cultural cold war
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A terrible day to have to answer for Donald Trump: Jen Pskai addresses questions for the White House
Jen Psaki notes that today seemed like an especially painful day to be White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and addresses some of the questions posed at today's White House briefing, from the MAHA Report citation scandal to the weird disconnect between Donald Trump's agenda and the Republicans who run the House and Senate.
