Deceitful AI Videos Mislead Seniors on Important Health Issues

[highplainsdem]

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-health-and-nutrition-pseudoscience-technology/deceitful-ai-videos-mislead-seniors-important-health-issues

Deceitful AI Videos Mislead Seniors on Important Health Issues
The script, visuals, and voiceover narration are generated by AI, and so are the fake studies brought up as evidence.

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 11 Dec 2025

-snip-

It was after delivering a lecture to the McGill Community for Lifelong Learning, made up of senior citizens with a thirst for knowledge, that I was asked about Senior Secrets.

Every few days, the YouTube channel with 321,000 subscribers posts a new video with “science-backed health tips, surprising remedies, and powerful longevity secrets that most people over 60 have never been told.” The channel’s icon is a cartoonish grandpa with a finger on his smiling lips, swearing you to secrecy, and the thumbnails advertising each video are emblazoned with red and yellow banners, like crime scene tape. “Goodbye old age!” screams the latest. “Never take this after 65!”; “Just 1 cup before bed repairs your eyes overnight”; “99% of seniors don’t know: huge mistake.” One of the channel’s trademarks is opening a video title with “Over 60?”.

-snip-

I picked four such channels and checked every scientific reference their most popular videos listed to see if they existed. Out of 65 references, five were real. I was unable to find the 60 others. As with the Copenhagen non-study, the journals, volumes, and issues were usually dead-on: the AI is simply inserting fake papers into real pages. Occasionally, a journal was made up. Often, the only authors listed were departments or institutes (like “Mayo Clinic Center for Aging” or “British Columbia University Exercise Science Department”), which is highly unusual and should serve as a red flag. People write papers, not departments.

-snip-

What we are witnessing with channels like Senior Secrets is the work of content farms, likely based in Vietnam. Sitting in front of dozens of computers are people with no formal training in science or medicine who write prompts for generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. The AI creates scripts, animations, thumbnails, voiceover narration, fake scientific papers; and these made-up elements are mashed together in a video that gets uploaded to YouTube.

-snip-

Much, much more at the link. All of it horrifying.

[flvegan]

1. Enshittification. No other word for it.

Probably in violation of YouTube's TOS and Community Guidelines as well. However, it also probably generates some ad revenue, therefore YouTube will do precisely shit about it.

[Hugin]

11. It's the AI era's emerging "like" and "friend" farms.

Give it a little while and we will probably see a price list for how much it costs to get a CT no matter how ludicrous the widest dissemination.

[SheltieLover]

2. Kick

[canetoad]

3. Just posted

The McGill link as a comment on one of their videos. (Over 60? Drink THIS IMMEDIATELY to Increase Blood Flow in Legs in 24 Hours!)

Wonder how long it will stay there.

[anciano]

4. Individual responsibility by the user is required.....

Just like the internet, AI is subject to misuse and the dissemination of incorrect information. It is the responsibility of the user to fact check and use common sense.

[erronis]

8. I've been a internet user since the early 80s, a web and content developer since. It's hard to deal with.

I don't use google searches (which also power Bing and DuckDuckGo).

It is very hard to discern what is worth pursuing anymore, even though I use a curated search (kagi.com).

I will look at the artificial-generated content but will rarely follow their suggestions.

Most of the people I try to help with getting online don't have the savvy to make these decisions. That's why they are the prey.

[highplainsdem]

12. Video scams of this type aren't even possible without genAI, especially at scale.

Just as chatbot scams with AI copies of people's voices aren't possible without these tools.

You're trying to defend technology most useful for fraud and cheating of all types, because it's all about pretense.

Not only are the tools unethical because they were trained on stolen intellectual property, but those tools are the greatest enablers of fraud ever.

And you want to shift the blame to the victims.

Just as AI.companies do - including telling users they're liable for all mistakes those inevitably hallucinating AI tools make.

This is the stupidest and most harmful non-weapon tech ever developed.

[anciano]

13. AI is now an integral part of modern life,

with AGI the likely next phase. Acceptance and adaptation are essential.

[highplainsdem]

14. None of that is true.

But it's very Borg-like. "Resistance is futile."

Guess again...

[anciano]

17. Time will tell ....

[CrispyQ]

5. Seniors shouldn't eat blueberries for breakfast.

I literally at that one.

[progree]

6. Librarians can't keep up with bad AI, Popular Science, 12/12/25

Last edited Sun Dec 14, 2025, 12:23 AM - Edit history (5)

Popular Science, 12/12/25

(edited to add the above line, even though it's in the subject line where it admittedly is easy to overlook. And the original source deserves prominence. But anyone expecting me to do a search of the Popular Science website to find a more direct link is out of luck. Almost nobody does that. If it's such a big deal to some, it's always an option to go dig up the link and post it as a reply, rather than just complaining)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/librarians-can-t-keep-up-with-bad-ai/ar-AA1SfhCN
Excerpts --

Programs like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot are still prone to offering made-up information and facts. As bad as that is on its own, the issue is further complicated by a tendency for these AI programs to produce seemingly reputable, yet wholly imaginary, sources. But as annoying as that is for millions of users, it’s becoming a major issue for the people trusted to provide reliable, real information: librarians.

“For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn’t exist,” Sarah Falls, a research engagement librarian at the Library of Virginia, told Scientific American.

Falls estimated that around 15 percent of all the reference questions received by her staff are written by generative AI, some of which include imaginary citations and sources. This increased burden placed on librarians and institutions is so bad that even organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross are putting people on notice about the problem. . . . “Because their ((AI's)) purpose is to generate content, they cannot indicate that no information exists; instead, they will invent details that appear plausible but have no basis in the archival record.”

Instead of asking a program like ChatGPT for a list of ICRC reports, the organization suggests you engage directly with their publicly available information catalogue ( https://archives.icrc.org/search/advanced ) and scholarly archives ( https://library.icrc.org/library/ ). The same strategy should be extended to any institution.

The last paragraph is specific to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). So it's just an example for one organization.

Bolding and double parenthesis items are progree's


https://archives.icrc.org/home

ICRC PUBLIC ARCHIVES HOLDINGS
The Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) document the history and activities of the organization since its creation in 1863. They are governed by the current institution’s access rules and available for consultation at the ICRC’s headquarters in Geneva upon request.

[erronis]

9. Thanks for linking to that via MSN. Please try to cite the more primary source

rather than having people have to navigate to MSN and find the sources.

We're all guilty of this. And DU is also an aggregator, so giving credit to the original source is useful and gives the clicks to the authors.

[progree]

10. I agree strongly that one should cite the primary source --

I did so in my subject line

"Librarians can't keep up with bad AI, Popular Science, 12/12/25"

but I agree it's easy to overlook it.

I will put it at the top of the body of my post too in a moment.

I hope you don't mean that I should go to the Popular Science website and find the article there and post that link because that just isn't going to happen. Almost nobody does that, and I think I'm contributing enough as it is.

[highplainsdem]

16. Yep. Reference librarians were among the first people to have valuable time wasted by chatbots. See

this thread from February 2023

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217674825

with what a London librarian had to say, just a few months after ChatGPT was released and started harming our information ecosystem.

[BidenRocks]

7. Over 60? Wait a day

Tomorrow it will be 'Over 70'.
I believe none of it and search everything.
Yesterday it was George Will.
Until near the end where he started repeating himself. Fairly common thing along with names and place mispronunciations.

I couldn't argue the content, just the lack of notice that it is ai slop.
TRUST NO ONE

[milestogo]

15. Sounds like someting RFK Jr would do.

[scipan]

18. So in this context, AI hallucinations are not a bug but a feature?

I'm not entirely convinced they really want to get rid of hallucinations.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

19. AI Garbage ads are everywhere.