Public Health Advocates Are So Desperate for Help Against Conspiracies They’ve Turned to the Place You’d Least Expect

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Last month’s Senate grilling of Dr. Anthony Fauci, if viewed by an audience that had not been subjected to years of propaganda, would be staggeringly strange.

There were hissing accusations of lies, corruption, and megalomania; comparisons to sadistic Nazi scientists; and statements, as if of undisputed fact, that Fauci killed millions of people. The nation’s most powerful Republicans, without any significant pushback, joined forces to shout down and criminally pursue the face of the COVID pandemic’s health authority based on wild, speculative, and facile conspiracy theories. It all prompted a kind of deeply existential question: If this is how we now treat a onetime pandemic hero, what will happen the next time we face a similar public health crisis?

Public health officials say with the rise of conspiracy thinking at the highest echelons of our national government, the next pandemic response could be so much worse . But they did have one potentially innovative and surprising, if disconcerting, solution to our national public health information crisis: A.I. has the potential to help stave off a conspiratorial catastrophe during the next pandemic.

Given everything that’s happened with our public health leadership since Donald Trump returned to power, most public health professionals Slate spoke with took a dim view of our possible responses to a future crisis. After a summer of foodborne illness crises, it’s clear our public health officials are struggling to handle basic public health. Indeed, they seem to be taking us backward: Just last week, it was reported that school vaccination rates have hit a new record low.

Still, how worried should we be about another pandemic? Historically, pandemics have happened multiple times a century, and many scholars believe that they’ll become more frequent due to climate change and deforestation. In the six years since COVID arrived in the U.S., the public health community has drawn no significant new conclusions about how to beat back conspiracy theories during a pandemic. The situation appears bad enough that when Slate asked experts how to conspiracy-proof a pandemic, responses often offered such bleakly unhelpful tidbits as “We need to study the effectiveness of our communication” and “This is going to take careful thought about strategic communications.” As Tara Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Slate, “We’re in a bad spot right now.”

But several experts, prodded for any note of optimism they could find, offered hope from artificial intelligence.

Admittedly, looking to A.I. for rescue is usually an eye-roll-worthy impulse. And coming from the field of disinformation in particular, A.I. is a Pandora’s box of yet-to-be-imagined evils. Generative A.I.