The MAHA report, GenAI, the Official Record and Democracy

Many in education are becoming increasingly used to encountering writing that may initially seem sound, but, on further inspection, appears to be the output of undeclared requests (prompts) for some kind of content put into one of an increasing array of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools.

However, the concern around the misuse of GenAI tools goes beyond education. On May 22nd, the White House’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission – headed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr – released the Make Our Children Healthy Again report. As first detailed by NOTUS, and documented by many other media outlets, the report contained dozens of non-existent references with some likely hallucinations (composites of information related to real references and authors rearranged to create real looking references to ultimately non-existent sources).

As I have explored with others in a recent Political Studies Review article titled Assessing ChatGPT as a Tool for Research on US State and Territory Politics, such non-existent and hallucinated sources are the hallmarks of content generated by GenAI tools. The White House, however, attributed the presence of non-existent sources to ‘formatting issues’. In an odd coda, a new version of the report was later released to ‘remove non-existent studies’.

Troublingly, evidence from the legal sphere, journalism, elsewhere in US government, and academia illustrates that the issue with the MAHA report is not an aberration.

GenAI, the Official Record, and Democracy

As I explored in a recent co-edited volume, The Official Record, the US version of which the MAHA report has now entered, can be broadly conceived of as the sum total of material created as a result of the operations of a government. Given the size and complexity of modern governments, official records are diverse, dynamic, and important for understanding state operations, along with the thinking of those working within, and making and implementing policy for, governments. As such, it is a key (for some, the key) source for understanding events. Yet, the MAHA report illustrates the precarious nature of the trust that we might put in the Official Record moving forward.

As with academia, sound government and a vibrant democracy depend on at least some agreement on what counts as data and evidence as well as the maintenance of honesty in the creation and preservation of the Official Record. However, the MAHA report shows at the least (and if one accepts the pretty unlikely explanation provided by the White House) sloppy referencing that would see undergraduate students docked marks. More likely it represents a willingness to outsource parts of the research and writing processes for a US government report to GenAI tools, and a failure to even bother to check if the references it provided existed, let alone whether they were accurate for the points being made.

If this approach to evidence and the Official Record are replicated in other parts of the US government, then a mistaken faith placed in such tools will undermine the formulation and implementation of evidence based policies and can be added to the list of factors that may undermine US democracy itself.

PSA member, Dr. Peter Finn, is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Kingston University and is Web Team Lead for the American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association

A longer version of this piece was published on the USAPP site of the London School of Economics here