Something seems wrong. There is an extensive list of symptoms. But instead of calling the doctors office to book an appointment, the individual goes to ChatGPT.
Health literacy is the idea of one’s ability to gather information to make informed decisions. For their HOSAFuture Health Professionals project, seniors Iffah Afsar, Nethra Bommidi, Sanvi Chaukade and Mihira Manikam founded Health Literacy. Their goal is to educate individuals on the dangers of relying on Artificial Intelligence with their health information.
“Technology is expanding beyond what we can even see,” Chaukade said. “AI specifically has been growing a lot, yes, it’s a good thing, but also, it’s expanding so fast that misinformation is spreading extremely quickly as well as medical misinformation, and this is being spread through AI online specifically targeting a lot of people.”
Health literacy has partnered with Wiley Middle school to present their lessons to the teachers to raise awareness. They are focused on educating middle age working class adults.
“There have been a lot of incidents as you can see in the news that using AI has negatively impacted people’s medication doses, all sorts of things, and misinformation,” Chaukade said. “So being able to tell others is amazing because we can possibly prevent these sorts of things happening to this age group in the future, at least a little bit.”
Health Literacy made a lesson plan with a presentation and multiple activities. Their activities include spotting AI pictures vs not. During their presentation, they have filled in the blank notes for the audience to complete.
“I’m feeling excited that we’ll be able to do activities with the targeted base group,” Chaukade said. “Instead of giving out just information about what to avoid, but to not avoid, we can actually put them in situations to stimulate where they can practice these skills that we’ve shown them throughout our presentation.”
According to the Health Literacy members, due to the increase of AI, it’s becoming difficult to distinguish health information especially for individuals aged 40-60. Annenberg Public Policy Center said 79% of U.S. adults look online for the answer to a question about a health symptom or condition, and 63% believe AI-generated health information is reliable.
“They are a vulnerable audience because we teenagers are very aware of social media,” Bommidi said. “But the middle aged adults might not be able to recognize. The problem with that is they’re not getting actual factual evidence or data.”
Having a group chat ensures consistent communication between the members. They organize all the activities and split them up while also maintaining deadlines. For their portfolio they have 20 pages, and each member is responsible for five pages.
“I love our team members,” Bommidi said. “They’re amazing. We get a lot of work done, and especially with senior year, it’s kind of hard to come together, but we make it a point to always get on calls and make sure we’re ahead of our work.”
AI doesn’t follow HIPAA guidelines, meaning individuals don’t know how their data is stored.
“It really plays a role right now in healthcare because now AI is being integrated within healthcare systems,” Manickam said. “Using it for patient information, it’s important that patient privacy is still being protected with HIPPA laws. If people believe AI too much, they would probably release their private information to AI and that could have detrimental effects later on in life.”