MAHA report, GenAI, the Official Record, and democracy

Many in education are becoming increasingly used to encountering writing that may initially seem sound, but, on further inspection, appears to be the output of undeclared requests (prompts) for some kind of content put into one of an increasing array of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools.
However, the concern around the misuse of GenAI tools goes beyond education. On May 22nd, the White House’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission – headed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr – released the Make Our Children Healthy Again report. As first detailed by NOTUS, and documented by many other media outlets, the report contained dozens of non-existent references with some likely hallucinations (composites of information related to real references and authors rearranged to create real looking references to ultimately non-existent sources).