An AI assistance?
The author of the MMWR report, county health officer Katherine Houser, said beer-tent workers were hesitant to provide details because they did not want to embarrass any members of their community. But one thing came to light that at the beginning of the fair, someone had put the left over food in the cooler overnight.
County health officials speculated that the cooler may have been contaminated. Salmonella It spread through cans of beer that people drank, increasing the possibility of spreading the infection. But with the temporary cooler gone, this will remain just a hypothesis. So, health investigators turned to ChatGPT for reassurance.
After providing the chatbot with details of the outbreak, health investigators asked it a series of questions, including: “Will S. agbeni grows in coolers with improper drainage?”; and “What examples of similar outbreaks have been documented in the scientific literature?”
Some questions are easy enough to answer without a chatbot. A simple search on PubMed, a federal database of scientific literature, immediately brings up examples Salmonella For example, being found in ice. But, the chatbot assured officials that the cooler was a “credible and probable” source of the outbreak and they stood by the hypothesis.
In the end, officials needed new cooler hygiene protocols — and concluded that AI assistance was helpful. “AI was effective for rapid situational awareness in this rural environment,” Houser wrote. However, they also acknowledged the potential concerns of using AI to investigate outbreaks: “Given the inherent limitations of generative AI tools, including potential inaccuracies and lack of source transparency, all AI-generated summaries were critically reviewed and validated against primary literature prior to incorporation,” they wrote.
Overall, the case report ends up being ambiguous. It’s unclear how helpful the chatbot actually was in this case. Critically reviewing AI-generated answers can take as much time as researching the answer itself. And of course, we’ll never know for sure what was really going on in that makeshift beer cooler — although, the new cooler sanitation protocols seem like a good idea.
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