Once upon a time, suspect supplement salespeople who wanted to get rich had to be on the Oprah TV show or be friends with President Clinton.
Not now. Drs. Oz, Chopra, Hyman, and Weil, or anyone who wants to take their place in the Four Horsemen of the Alternative(1) won't need to spend time nourishing relationships with wealthy progressive elites. They can even become famous without knowing it. Thanks to AI.
Deepfake AI is no longer just someone pretending to be Tom Cruise, they are everywhere selling all of the supplements and miracle potions that used to involve someone with a degree being the spokesperson.
No longer. A physician may not even know they are in an ad or otherwise appearing online. They may even have been targeted by a competitor to undermine their reputation.(2)
A new paper identifies the ways companies and individuals use these deepfakes, from product endorsements and disinformation to engagement farming and even phishing.
Make sure the conspiracy theory about diseases being caused by corn syrup, microwave ovens, and oatmeal but cured by his ozone therapy and a heavy metal detox is sold by the real Dr. Hyman and not a fake one.
It works because even though people love supplements and diet gimmicks claim to distrust medicine, they crave legitimacy for their beliefs. A doctor who promotes LipoMax or kratom or some miracle potion is Standing Up To Big Pharma rather than being part of the Vast Corporate Conspiracy. Like with political claims, most people won't investigate the legitimacy, they buy in because it matches their bias.
It isn't just Chinese companies selling their garbage to the gullible on TikTok, now they can be found everywhere. The American Medical Association is in a panic; it's something they can't control the way they do healthcare policy. Normal people who see video online of Dr. C. Everett Koop spouting nonsense about weedkillers causing cancer would be skeptical, but they are not the target demographic. It is ideological and purchasing zealots the grifters want to reach.
Deepfakes are creating an industry, which means another industry will crop up to combat them. That is good news for Nvidia and Micron and everyone else who sells the infrastructure for AI tools, and it is good news for the locations that President Biden designated as AI data centers in his Executive Order 14141: Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure mandating and subsidizing them, but until the investigation tools match the fakes, don't believe that the commercial where Jonas Salk endorses organic food is real.
Citation: Athni TS, Classifying Physician Deepfakes: The Many Faces of AI-Powered Medical Deception, J Med Internet Res , 026;28:e111657, doi: 10.2196/111657
NOTES:
(1) A spot will also open up if they become a Republican, like Oz did. The media, and Columbia University, that defended him when a group called on him to be removed from the university and were dismissed by his progressive allies as Shills For Big Pharma and Corporate Funded turned on him the day he announced his intention to run for Congress as a Republican. And then Columbia removed him.
(2) The left used to rule at that sort of thing - organic food marketers had an "A-Team" of influencers - Mother Jones bloggers, academics whose salaries were exclusively paid for by their corporations, etc. - and a checklist of methods to get a prominent academic to be senior author of some paper written for them which then got promoted by 1,000 social media bots. Now the right is just as good at it.
