Concerns Over Citation Errors in Kennedy’s Health Report

The White House has attributed the citation errors in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) commission report to a “formatting issue.” However, the integrity of the report is under scrutiny due to questionable sources and potential reliance on artificial intelligence tools, particularly ChatGPT.

An investigation by investigation by NOTUS uncovered numerous errors within the MAHA report, including broken links, incorrect issue numbers, and missing or inaccurate authors. Alarmingly, some studies cited to support the report’s conclusions were either misrepresented or entirely fabricated. At least seven of the referenced sources were identified as fictitious by NOTUS.

Further analysis by another source investigation by The Washington Post revealed that at least 37 of the 522 citations were repeated throughout the document. Notably, several URLs contained the term “oaicite,” a marker associated with responses generated by OpenAI’s AI models, suggesting that generative AI may have been employed in the report’s creation.

Generative AI tools are known to produce what are termed “hallucinations,” which could account for the various inaccuracies found in the report. Similar citation issues have been documented in legal filings submitted by AI experts and other contexts companies building the models. Despite these concerns, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a proponent of the “AI Revolution,” stating announced during a House Committee meeting in May that “we are already using these new technologies to manage health care data more efficiently and securely.”

In response to the growing concerns regarding the accuracy of the citations, press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the issue in a briefing on Thursday statement. While she did not mention the use of AI tools, she characterized the errors as “formatting issues” and defended the health report as being “backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”

The Washington Post reported that the MAHA report file was updated on Thursday to eliminate some of the oaicite markers and to replace certain non-existent sources with alternative citations. In a statement to the publication, Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledged that “minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but 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.”

As the debate continues over the validity of the MAHA report, the implications of using AI in generating such critical documents raise significant questions about the reliability of information disseminated by government entities. The reliance on AI tools in research and reporting must be scrutinized to ensure that public health policies are based on accurate and credible data.