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Hastings Center News

Disinformation, Trust, and the Role of AI: Highlights of Our Event

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Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky moderated a discussion with experts Reed Tuckson and Timothy Caulfield on disinformation, trust, and the role of AI, focusing on current and future threats to health and democracy. The event was The Daniel Callahan Annual Lecture, which took place at Rockefeller University in New York on September 9. Watch the recording here.

“One of the things we realized during the pandemic is that science is amazing, but without trust in science it cannot deliver its benefits,” said Ravitsky, opening the discussion. “And we realized that misinformation and disinformation literally kill people. It’s not a conceptual issue, it costs lives and so we wanted to discuss issues related to trust and disinformation.”

All agreed that combatting misinformation, disinformation, and the distrust that they cause is one of the greatest challenges of our time, and that the problem is exacerbated by AI and increasingly sophisticated deepfakes. While no one promised easy fixes, all were hopeful about the prospects for countering misinformation and disinformation over the long term. A key is a multipronged approach that involves education, “pre-bunking”, and debunking. Health care professionals can do this by listening to and talking with their patients.

Reed Tuckson, MD, is a founder of the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science, an organization formed to provide a “big tent” that seeks to unite, perhaps for the first time ever, organizations from across the entire health ecosystem, along with additional organizations concerned with advancing trust and factual science-based decision-making. Tuckson recently joined The Hastings Center’s board of directors.

Timothy Caulfield, LLB, LLM, is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta who has devoted much of his career to debunking health misinformation. He is the author of two bestselling books, The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness (Penguin 2012) and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash (Penguin 2015). His most recent book is Relax, Dammit!: A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety (Penguin Random House, 2020). He is a co-founder of ScienceUpFirst, an organization against misinformation.