#2 - Digital Snake Oil: How AI Makes Health Disinformation Dangerously Persuasive

What if a convincing medical article you read online—citing peer-reviewed journals and quoting real-sounding experts—was entirely fabricated by AI?In this episode, we dive into the unsettling world of AI-generated health disinformation. Researchers recently built custom GPT-based chatbots trained to spread myths. The result? Persuasive narratives full of fabricated studies, misleading statistics, and plausible-sounding jargon—powerful enough to sway even savvy readers.We break down how these AI systems were created, why today’s safeguards failed to stop them, and what this means for public health. With disinformation spreading faster than truth on social media, even a single viral post can lead to real-world consequences: lower vaccination rates, delayed treatments, or widespread mistrust in medical authorities.But there’s hope. Using a four-pronged approach—fact-checking, digital literacy, communication design, and policy—we explore how society can fight back. This episode is a call to action: to become vigilant readers, ethical technologists, and thoughtful citizens in a world where even falsehoods can be generated on demand.References:How to Combat Health Misinformation: A Psychological Approach Jon Roozenbeek & Sander van der Linden American Journal of Health Promotion, 2022Health Disinformation Use Case Highlighting the Urgent Need for Artificial Intelligence Vigilance: Weapons of Mass Disinformation Bradley D. Menz, Natansh D. Modi, Michael J. Sorich, Ashley M. Hopkins JAMA Internal Medicine, 2024Current Safeguards, Risk Mitigation, and Transparency Measures of Large Language Models Against the Generation of Health Disinformation Bradley D. Menz et al. BMJ, 2024Urgent Need for Standards and Safeguards for Health-Related Generative Artificial Intelligence Reed V. Tuckson & Brinleigh Murphy-ReuterAnnals of Internal Medicine, 2025 Assessing the System-Instruction Vulnerabilities of Large Language Models to Malicious Conversion Into Health Disinformation Chatbots Natansh D. Modi, Bradley D. Menz, and colleagues Annals of Internal Medicine, 2025Credits: Theme music: Nowhere Land, Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/