A Nature article published two days ago might make you go hmmmmm: To increase lagging vaccination rates, scientists developed specialized AI actors to talk to people online to convince them to get vaccinated. This was done in response to all-important but unmentioned “stakeholders” demanding that chatbots be deployed to improve vaccine acceptance among the refusers:
Who are these stakeholders? The word sustainability was a dead giveaway, so I looked up the usual suspect. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is behind this idea and spent $6,183,326 on such “hybrid advising vaccine chatbots”: Johns Hopkins, another global stakeholder (also financed by Bill Gates), launched a chatbot called Vira. While being active on Twitter, I noticed that from time to time, posts from Twitter users were strangely similar, as if AI generated them: (sorry for the small font size - this is a large image - open in a separate window to enlarge it if you want to read the text) Are those persons real people? Who knows. They might be. It is challenging to investigate specific instances. Still, I often felt that vaccine promoters' activities were not entirely organic, and some felt like automated operations. AI Chatbots Were Rigorously Evaluated - And Found Lacking!The Nature study I brought up was an attempt to evaluate whether these chatbots were effective. The results were mixed! These AI systems were not effective when dealing with educated people and often decreased vaccination intentions, as the Nature article explains:
Talking to these chatbots was turning educated people away from vaccines:
They also did not work against vaccine skeptics:
More Vaccine Chatbots Planned!The authors of the article, suckling at the teat of AI chatbot funding, clearly are not giving up on future development and have ideas to use them for other vaccination campaigns:
Similar chatbots are deployed to promote climate change: Have you ever met pro-vaccine online users that sounded like automated bots? Did they convince you? If your answer is “yes and no,” congratulations on remaining an independent and critical thinker! |