Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report appears to have used garbled artificial intelligence to generate scientific citations, in addition to referencing studies that do not exist.
Kennedy’s MAHA report, released last week, decried America's food supply, pesticides and prescription drugs. It cited hundreds of studies, but the outlet NOTUS found that some of those studies did not actually exist.
Now experts have found evidence that scientific citations in the report were generated by AI, which experts slammed as “sloppy” and “shoddy,” The Washington Post reports.
Experts told the newspaper that there are definitive signs that the references in the report were generated by the U.S. artificial intelligence company OpenAI. Some citations included “oaicite” attached to URLs, a marker that the company’s chatbot was used to generate the references.
The use of AI in citations undermines the credibility of the report, George C. Benjamin of the American Public Health Association told the outlet.
“This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,” the executive director 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.”
Analysis conducted by The Post found that at least 21 links in the original version of the report to scientific studies or articles were dead.
On Thursday afternoon, the report was updated to remove mentions of “oaicite” markers and it continued to be worked on overnight, according to the newspaper.
The Department of Health and Human Services characterized it as “minor citation and formatting errors” in a statement to outlet and said that they have since been corrected.
“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,” department spokesperson Andrew Nixon said. “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.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was also questioned about the bungled report at Thursday’s briefing and maintained it was “backed on good science.”
“I understand there was some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated.” Leavitt told reporters. “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.”
But experts told The Post that the report should be discarded.
“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 Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former Food and Drug Administration official in the Obama administration.
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