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Misinformation About Vaccines and Autism Using AI

By / / AI, misinformation chatbots, Steve Kirsch, vaccine chatbots, vaccines and autism

If you can create misinformation about vaccines and autism using artificial intelligence, you have to wonder if AI is going to put anti-vaccine influencers out of a job!

Steve Kirsch has programmed his AI chatbot to lie about vaccines and autism...
Steve Kirsch has programmed his AI chatbot to lie about vaccines and autism, something people have been doing for years…

Will this be the age of the AI Vaccine Misinformation Super Spreaders?

Misinformation About Vaccines and Autism Using AI

There are some reasons to be optimistic about AI when it comes to information about vaccines.

AI chatbots have identified Steve Kirsch as a misinformation spreader.
AI chatbots have identified Steve Kirsch as a misinformation spreader.

AI chatbots are already well aware that folks like Steve Kirsch spread misinformation about vaccines.

AI chatbots know that there is no evidence linking vaccines to autism.
AI chatbots know that there is no evidence linking vaccines to autism.

And that vaccines are safe and not associated with autism!

So how did Steve Kirsch get his AI chatbot to say that vaccines do cause autism?

You can train an AI chatbot to push misinformation about vaccines and autism.
Steve Kirsch simply shows how easy it is to train an AI chatbot to push misinformation about vaccines and autism.

It’s no secret.

“Still, for all its cleverness and brilliance (its IQ has been clocked at 147), ChatGPT is just a robot that can slice, dice and reproduce only the information it’s been fed. And it doesn’t know what’s correct and what isn’t.”

ChatGPT is amazing. But beware its hallucinations!

Kirsch or ‘his friend’ almost certainly fed specific anti-vaccine literature into a chatbot, so that it would regurgitate the exact answers they wanted.

“The ability to tweak a chatbot is a result of what’s known in the A.I. field as fine-tuning. Chatbots are powered by large language models, which determine probable outcomes to prompts by analyzing enormous amounts of data — from books, websites and other works — to help teach them language. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
Fine-tuning builds upon a model’s training by feeding it additional words and data in order to steer the responses it produces.”

See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation

If you don’t believe me, get him to post the sources his AI chatbot used to answer his question about vaccines and autism.

Misinformation Chatbots

And remember that AI, as a large language model, should generally help to reduce the influence of the very vocal minority who believe that vaccines don’t work, aren’t safe, and aren’t necessary.

AI will soon help you quickly fact check all of the harmful misinformation and propaganda these people create and then launder through their websites and social media accounts!

“While AI offers substantial benefits to public health, it also has risks. AI’s potential to replicate human-like content can risk reproducing biases and amplifying misinformation, especially around sensitive issues like vaccine acceptance.”

Generative artificial intelligence can have a role in combating vaccine hesitancy

Still, if anti-vaccine influencers train their chatbots well enough, they will simply end up putting themselves out of a job. And then everyone will be able to get their misinformation about vaccines without having to subscribe to a newsletter or buy unnecessary supplements.

Or maybe that is the way AI takes over the world.

Instead of a Terminator type Judgement Day with an AI dropping nuclear bombs on our cities to kill us all, maybe it will just spread misinformation about vaccines and wait until we all die of vaccine preventable diseases…

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