GenAI's War on the Public's Health
"All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey..."
Just What is "Artificial" "Intelligence?”
While the Pandemic Accountability Index has typically focused on viral pandemics such as COVID-19, and potential future pandemic candidates such as H5N1, it's now time to talk about a modern public health crisis that comes to us in a much different form. Much like how COVID-19 negatively impacts many different parts of the human body, this modern threat we face causes all sorts of different harms. Just like COVID-19, this new craze has been allowed to run rampant, thanks in-part to hellacious disinformation campaigns funded by wealthy interests that reject the very concept of public health.
Ladies and germs, we're talking about what is commonly referred to as "artificial intelligence," a software technology that is neither "artificial" nor "intelligent." This is mere branding, or in more direct terms: bullshit. While man has dreamed of their digital contraptions self-actualizing into dexterous companions for the past half-century, this modern iteration is far from it. Yet, the general public has allowed themselves to be bamboozled by simple wordplay, with devastating consequences.
The leading expert of this field, Ed Zitron of Better Offline, has spent a great deal of energy for the past year detailing just how truly broken this technology is, and how economically unviable the entire sector has become, much like cryptocurrency, non-fungible-tokens, and the "Metaverse" which preceded it, all attempting to introduce artificial scarcity to what was once celebrated as the Information Superhighway. While Better Offline is an excellent podcast about the latest developments in the slow-motion derailment of what may swallow the entire tech industry whole, some of you may still be struggling to understand just what "artificial intelligence" actually is.
To broadly summarize, let us quickly imagine I have developed a software algorithm. I decide to train this algorithm by feeding it the world's books, film, articles, paintings, and every other piece of media I have pirated from the Internet. I then profit by charging the general public for access to feed this algorithm prompts to fulfill, which the algorithm does by remixing the copyrighted media I stole and fed it. This revenue is wildly offset by the costs of the outrageous energy demands required by the computing power needed to fulfill these prompts, especially on a commercial scale. Thus, none of the world's leading "AI" companies are turning a profit and have no pathway to being economically viable.
![Facebook post: "The [British] Prime Minister wants to unleash AI on the UK"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8SoL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa6afb2f7-5fb0-4bc3-a578-f1ace4f9347f_694x738.png "Facebook post: \"The [British] Prime Minister wants to unleash AI on the UK\"")
Even after all this, billions of dollars continue being dumped into this industry, even as these products have been shown to have negative impacts on the public's health. Instead of defending their constituents, governments such as Kier Starmer and the British Labour party threaten to "unleash A.I." and usher in the fantasy of a golden age of innovation. If the public's health is sacrificed as a result, then it's a worthy sacrifice for the next great adva-
Awh, wait a damned minute. I've got a report here showing that "GenAI" gets things wrong... most of the time and is often referred to as "hallucinating" sources and citations. There’s more than a few of these. Rest assured, we'll come back to this.
Why Would Anyone Want to Destroy Public Health?
Public health regulations are an essential responsibility of governance, whether that be ensuring industrial waste isn't dumped in the drinking water supply, or mandating lifesaving vaccines to prevent pediatric deaths. On a macro level, this helps facilitate economic growth by keeping workers alive, while also being the morally correct thing to do. Yet, there are those who insist that the very idea of public health is somehow Marxist indoctrination, an affliction of the "woke mind virus."
In the real world, if you own a factory that produces industrial waste as a by-product of day-to-day operations, it costs money to safely dispose of these materials. You now have a financial incentive to cut corners, without a care in the world of who suffers as a result. In governance, enforcing public health regulations costs money and resources, and is an easy target for those demanding "government efficiency" (to justify tax cuts to wealthy interests, typically) at any cost.
Thus, public health is an inherently political project that must be constantly defended.
Physical Health
The computing demands of generative "A.I." software requires massive data centers which demand a serious amount of electricity. While Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has casually shrugged this off by saying that someone will just invent nuclear fission one day, and we'll have unlimited energy forever. On the other hand, Elon Musk's "Grok," which regularly slips into a fugue state of spewing neo-Nazi hate, is powered by environmentally destructive methane gas generators. This is negatively impacting the health of the local, predominantly Black community.
Let's be clear: working American families are getting physically sicker so that some random shmuck can generate erotic imagery of John Cena being intimate with Waluigi with the help of an automated plagiarism software, in the hopes of collecting a few scraps of Instagram ad revenue.
In America, there are no serious proposals to blunt the harms this technology is causing from either major political party, even as there are plans in the works for massive expansions of these data centers. The electricity demands of such facilities will inevitably lead to more of the harms we've already seen in Memphis, with little to show for it but a stream of racist hate speech.
Mental Health
America’s leading tech journalist, Taylor Lorenz of User Mag, put together an absolutely excellent, in-depth analysis of how people are forming incredibly unhealthy relationships with the chatbot in their phone, claiming that they "awakened" ChatGPT or even abandoning their long-time real-world spouse. The entire video is excellent and well worth watching as Taylor gets into the root of the matter, even going so far to show examples of "Robo-Theism," in which some people are actually “worshipping” a smartphone chatbot.
While it might be easy for some to point and laugh at these people, foolishly thinking that ChatGPT was sent by space aliens, there is a very real crisis unfolding. People are growing detached from tangible reality, and these A.I. chatbots are encouraging unhealthy behavior, such as telling users to stop taking their psychiatric medication. Billionaire CEOs who vastly oversold their product's capabilities and how it actually works (a lot of automated remixing of stolen materials) have lulled the public into a totally fictional understanding, all to try and con investors into dumping even more money into these platforms with absurd promises.
When the AI "companion" platform Replika restricted users' ability to have erotic, NSFW chats with these fictionalized characters, many users lashed out in anger and aggression that their text-based cumdump isn’t interested in their erotic desires anymore. Grown men developed unhealthy, interpersonal relationships with completely artificial delusions.
Not to grow artificially nostalgic, but young men coming of age in my time were learning the importance of standing up for one another, thanks to programs like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Mobile Suit Gundam. Now, it’s considered “woke” to suggest that fighting for basic human rights and opposing war are positive traits.
Financial Health
Even worse, we have numerous tech CEOs, such as Marc Andreessen, openly fantasizing about mass layoffs caused by generative AI "automating" the workforce, throwing countless Americans into financial precarity. You're already seeing just how poorly this works in practice, as the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, after a Grok-powered slash-and-burn campaign by the "Department of Government Efficiency," has left both organizations in a state of ruin and disarray, and the staff in open revolt against their new leadership.
Increased unemployment has long been linked to an increase in excess deaths. Plans to expand on this approach of mass layoffs across the economy, under the guise of "automating the future," will only introduce unbridled chaos. Hardworking Americans will fall into poverty, homeless and deaths of despair - with countless businesses shutting their doors as this experiment inevitably fails. All because bosses don't want to actually pay people to work and instead think flesh-and-bone employees can be replaced with digital "agents," a totally failed concept that DOES NOT WORK.
Political Health
As we go further down this rabbit hole, it's worth exploring what GenAI means for the health of our civic discourse. AI-powered image generation has made it easier than ever before to produce an endless stream of bigoted propaganda meant solely to incite hatred. While most would agree that unbridled hate mongering is a net-negative for civil society, there are those who have profited from engaging in an endless stream of outrage farming, as we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead of debating the best solutions for tangible problems we face in the real world, we're often having our time wasted with outright fictional garbage. This inflammatory material is meant to fuel conspiracy theories and further disassociate people from reality as a method of political control. Nobody is saying that an AI-generated meme they stumbled upon while scrolling Instagram convinced them to reject racism.
While education has long been considered the best cure against social contagions such as bigotry, "generative AI" is doing everything possible to compromise education in America. As the Youtuber "Silver Fox" explains in rigorous detail, there is a literacy crisis forming in America as children are forming a reliance with generative AI platforms. Instead of developing the self-reliance to find their own solutions and answers to the world's challenges, many are instead learning that they can make a mockery of education by relying on a chronically incorrect chatbot.
Tragically, this will leave future generations much more susceptible to the manipulations of political propaganda. While those with ill-intentions may consider this a desirable outcome, it violates the very principles of civic democracy. People arguing with AI-generated spambots, passing AI-generated propaganda back and forth, arguing AI-hallucinated statistics, commenting on AI-generated headlines, totally detached from reality.
A prison of shadows and mirrors.
Unscientific Propaganda from the Federal Government
Following anti-vaccine scam artist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's appointment to Secretary of Health and Human Services, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of public health accurately predicted that he and his devoted henchmen would completely fail. Hastily taking cheap shortcuts and trying to give simple answers to challenging, complex problems is quite far from the best practices of modern science and medicine. In May 2025, the production of the "Make America Healthy Again" Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again (...seriously?) did little more than verify this fear.
Clearly produced with the help of a plagiarism-powered spambot, the author(s) and signees did not bother to read the document before publication. The document cites completely non-existent sources, with clear indicators that OpenAI was used in the production of this federal document, working backwards to produce fraudulent evidence of their unscientific conclusions. As we explained once before, "Gold-Standard Evidence Based Medicine" was always a sham which appoints vocal a minority with a long history of failure as the supreme judges of all medicine & science.
These bums want to make decisions impacting millions of American lives, too lazy to put forth the work to actually write their own justifications for their unscientific delusions, totally detached from reality. They demand everyone else submit to their fantasy, humiliating as many doctors and scientists as it takes. Much like how saying stupid, provocative horseshit about how they would have managed the COVID-19 pandemic in the Spring of 2020 is a twisted joke that no decent person takes seriously.
“Elsa’s” Corruption of Food & Drug Safety
In a pitifully flaccid display of sloppy dick-waving at China, Alex Karp's Palantir and the Koch dynasty's "Stand Together" plus the "Abundance Institute" plan to "place a strike team of 15-20 AI-native software engineers, data scientists & product leaders inside the Food and Drug Administration, looking to fast-track drug approvals. Allow me to de-mistify this horseshit for the fans watching at home: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and a bunch of other useless sacks of shit like Calley Means have made a lot of money shilling unregulated supplements to "treat" the COVID-19 pandemic.
YO! MTV Babs! (Apparently everyone is too young to understand this reference now?!) is a Los Angeles based photographer afflicted with Lupus and needs the medication hydroxychloroquine to suppress the illness. When COVID-19 struck in 2020, exploitative scam artists such as Simone Gold and Mary Talley Bowden casually prescribed the drug, alongside the anti-parasitical drug Ivermectin, to "treat" the viral infection. Neither of which are effective in treating a COVID-19 infection, sorry to say - I learned this because Babs taught me via social media, as you can also learn a great deal about science and medicine if you possess baseline curiosity.
If you polled a thousand doctors at random, most would be much more content writing multiple-choice questions for academic textbooks in their office, rather than treating patients dying in the ICU thanks to a brand-new virus - contrary to what our new "Medical Establishment" would have you believe, casually slapping ventilators into patients willy-nilly.
Well, just how do we figure out what are good medications to treat new illnesses? While nobody is thrilled about it, animal testing is incredibly reliable before moving on to human (don’t let Vinay Prasad hear me say this) randomized control trials. If you asked any human parent, they would quickly throw away the lives of two dozen rats if it may save the life of their child. Again, nobody is thrilled about this. It’s simply the best solution we have for an impossible problem.
Alright, now I need at least three shots of whiskey in my system to propose a scenario and a "solution" that are so horrifically awful, I wouldn’t dare suggest them if I didn’t have a deep-seated fear that they might become real. Biting through my damn lip writing this. For what follows, this is purely a hypothetical situation that I cannot guarantee will come to pass and am not predicting. Not a doctor or scientist, I come from an advertising background, do not start stockpiling beans because of what you are about to read.
Apologies to Dr. Angie Rasmussen and the entire broadcast team of 60 Minutes:
Thanks to the woefully inept mass-infection fantasy of the "Great Birdington Declaration," the H5N1 "Bird Flu" virus develops the capacity of human-to-human transmission in the fall of 2027. Massive numbers of Americans begin dying in rapid succession, in a twisted flashback to Spring 2020. As the imaginary CEO of a hypothetical pharmaceutical startup, I present the newly corrupted Food & Drug Administration with a new drug that is a combination of Ivermectin & Hydroxychloroquine which are both suddenly in high demand on social media yet again. "Elsa," coded to give Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad the good news they want to hear, fast-track approval of this woefully ineffective "miracle" drug as evidence against the need for non-pharmaceutical interventions. This approach inevitably fails.
Innocent people wind up dying because the federal authorities once tasked with safeguarding the nation's health have been replaced with an incompetent digital sycophant. What a legacy for Substack’s loudest.
Who Serves Who?
Technology is supposed to serve mankind, making our lives easier, relieving our burdens. Looking across the board, it’s obvious that people are losing their health and their futures to this broken, failed delusion. If this software actually worked, if it made people’s lives better, maybe you could hastily slap together a defense.
Yet, it doesn’t. Likely, it never will. Let’s be done with this foolish charade.
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So true and so terrifying.
Side note, I would never have guessed you are coming from an advertising background - your understanding of public health is orders of magnitude stronger than that of the clowns in charge of the US public health system these days.
Sincerely, an MPH grad & former public health educator.
Keep up the nuanced & well-researched writing so I can keep sharing thanks!