AI health slop for seniors

Jonathan Jarry reviewed several AI-generated health videos with millions of views for the McGill Office for Science & Society. The AI slop [Wikipedia] that he waded through was only a fraction of what is now spewing out of Asian content farms.

And the target audience? Senior citizens! People who barely know that AI slop exists, let alone how to spot it. Generative AI keeps shredding our assumptions about how much can be faked, and how fast, and this stuff seems more real to the naive just by virtue of its sheer quantity: surely so much content must be real!

It also all “seems legit” thanks particularly to copious fake citations:

I picked four such channels and checked every scientific reference their most popular videos listed to see if they existed. Out of 65 references, five were real. I was unable to find the 60 others. As with the Copenhagen non-study, the journals, volumes, and issues were usually dead-on: the AI is simply inserting fake papers into real pages. Occasionally, a journal was made up.

The result would be laughable if it weren’t so disturbingly effective.

I’ve updated my article “15 Kinds of Bogus Citations” to reflect this freaky new reality, and given the whole thing a bit of a clean-up — after years of erratic patching and updating, it was time for a nice smoothing edit.