Failures uncovered as US health secretary touted ‘gold-standard’ science in health report ordered by Trump team

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s flagship health commission report contains citations to studies that do not exist, according to an investigation by the US publication Notus.

The report exposes glaring scientific failures from a health secretary who earlier this week threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals.

The 73-page “Make America healthy again” report – which was commissioned by the Trump administration to examine the causes of chronic illness, and which Kennedy promoted it as “gold-standard” science backed by more than 500 citations – includes references to seven studies that appear to be entirely invented, and others that the researchers say have been mischaracterized.

    • @jballs@sh.itjust.works
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      13716 days ago

      That’s exactly what I was thinking. A human doesn’t accidentally cite multiple made up studies. So these fuckers are writing government policy by saying “Hey ChatCPT, write a scientific paper with citations about how vaccines are bad.”

      • @Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        16 days ago

        Yeah, humans will cite real studies that don’t say what they claim (either from malice or misunderstanding) or just vaguely say ‘studies say’, not pull an entire citation out of the air.

        I’m leaning towards making it illegal to use AI (generative LLM) in government work. All it can do is mislead and introduce errors.

      • @TommySoda@lemmy.world
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        2616 days ago

        And 70% of people will never check to see if those sources are legit. Kinda like how most people just read the headlines.

        • @tibi@lemmy.world
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          15 days ago

          Not checking is one thing, but seeing so many people actually dismissing when someone calls out the factual errors is so infuriating. Like not only you are an ignorant dumbfuck who doesn’t bother checking the evidence, but you are stupid too and criticize people who point out the glaring flaws and cry out cancel culture. Or, of course, you are an awful person who doesn’t care about the truth as long as you get your way.

      • Lemminary
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        816 days ago

        ChatCPT

        ChatCCP, ChatUSA, Chat$Trump, TruthChat… What will they come up with next!

    • Null User Object
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      3516 days ago

      I’ve read three different articles (including the NOTUS one) about this, and none of the alleged “journalists” has the courage to say that these kind of errors are highly symptomatic of LLM generated text. Nobody mentions AI or LLMs even once.

      It’s like they’re so intent on being unbiased, that they can’t bring themselves to connect even the most obvious dots for people.


      What happened?

      Well, the government released this report with lots of weird errors, such as references to scientific research that doesn’t exist.

      How could that happen?

      Shhhhh, no no no. We can’t talk about that. We’re the news media. We just throw puzzle pieces at the busy people trying to keep their underpaid jobs, raise a family, and make ends meet. We don’t help them assemble the pieces into a coherent picture. That would be ludicrous.

      • @Thrashy@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        Be careful about that one, though. In addition to Word, for whatever reason iPhones automatically convert “–“ to “—“ so if you’re dealing with anybody like me who marks mid-sentence breaks with double dashes out of old habit, you’re going to get false positives.