Misinformation study: privacy, medical, AI, and other misinformation on social media

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“Biohack your DNA with AI” is the title text on the video. This almost makes me feel like this person is one of many in a misinformation campaign funded by AI companies, maybe she’s winding up to sell her own products, or maybe it’s more just trend and follower fishing, could be all the above.

I just came across this on another tech group laughing about this, but this actually makes me a bit uncomfortable to think how many people will see this and believe and share what is being said here. I figured it might be of value to bring in some of these wild misinformation videos going around on social media to kind of remind ourselves where the zeitgeist is with their mental models. It’s easy for us to lose sight of the most vulnerable.

@stephunnyjane I saw a TikTok talking about downloading your raw DNA from 23andme and Ancestry and uploading it to various websites…

The user doesn’t want to pay for those so she decides to upload her raw DNA to ChatGPT.

@stephunnyjane I want to say that this is for entertainment purposes only, I’m not a doctor or a scientist, a DNA researcher, or anything like that. This is what I chose to do with my information, you can make the same choice or not.

This is her only valuable claim that I can just take on face value as she’s just informing us about her lack of medical expertise. Although, this also comes off as a rhetorical device used to establish trustworthiness in the lack of credibility, and then use anecdote to fill in the credibility aspects later in the video.

@stephunnyjane Raw DNA files do not contain PII like your name, email, or your birthday. They’re essentially just long lists of genetic markers that only mean something when they’re interpreted. So even though it feels very “you” the file is not traceable to you.

Clear lack of mental models that folks have about being on any website and how much of their information is just oozing out of their phone to anything installed on it that phones home or any website they visit. Plain and simple, you have an account that you use a credit card to pay for that service where you uploaded that untraceable file and if you aren’t paying for the service then they just need you IP address, fingerprinting, tracers, etc.. etc..

Blind leading the blind is concerning here because everyone on social media needs to speak their truth without any self criticism of the message they are spreading or else people won’t believe them. I think that’s what scares me here.

@stephunnyjane Also, your data isn’t used to train OpenAI models as of the recording of this video. Everything is processed privately and securely.

Of course, no source added as to why she believes this.

OpenAI Terms of Use
Our use of content. We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, and improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and policies, and keep our Services safe.
Source

She also makes a strange claim that because 23andme is filing bankruptcy that you should download your data because you don’t know who will get ahold of that data, and then continues to explain how to upload your files to ChatGPT, who then has the legal right to sell any information you willingly provide to it.

Open AI Privacy Policy Section 3
Vendors and Service Providers : To assist us in meeting business operations needs and to perform certain services and functions, we may disclose Personal Data to vendors and service providers, including providers of hosting services, customer service vendors, cloud services, content delivery services, support and safety monitoring services, email communication software, web analytics services, payment and transaction processors, and other information technology providers. Pursuant to our instructions, these parties will access, process, or store Personal Data only in the course of performing their duties to us.

She then moves on to discussing all the “medical breakdown” offered by ChatGPT of her DNA and suggested she metabolizes medicine faster or has a slower dopamine intake, etc.. etc.. This eventually moves to her asking ChatGPT to suggest a supplement regime, that she tested for a month and it worked magic. Her face “depuffed”, her mood stabalized, her hair stopped shedding, her menstrual cycle stabalized, she’s more calm, more energized, more clear-headed.

She does the trendy anti-intellectual talk on how none of her doctors were able to pinpoint any of this miracle supplement catering to her body’s apparent estrogen dominance, a highly speculative condition studied in alt medicine circles with little to no scientific consensus to back it up. She also uses it to build a skincare routine.

@stephunnyjane All it took was me putting my DNA into an AI, and now I have the keys to feeling better, it’s incredible.

She then reiterates her guide to uploading your information to ChatGPT.

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Reminds me of that Drew Gooden video where he installs a pregnancy test and scale off the App Store.

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I had never heard of Drew Gooden until now, but this video is hilarious

Back when I was eight, and the only thing you could do on a computer was play solitaire, or pinball, or like .. do math on a calculator. Because back then, when you had nothing else to do y’know maybe just type some numbers…see what numbers you can come up with.

This is just too damn accurate of my childhood.

But like, getting to the zeitgeist mentality. I think that he really hits on what truly scares me about how little education has done for cluing now two almost three generations of people on how computers and networks function, and how that information is passed around.

You can’t just download an app, that’s going to change the hardware from within the phone. Like if the iPhone had the ability to weight things, you’d think they would like advertise and there would be a built-in scale app. It wouldn’t be something where they would be like “Oh yeah, just download some thirty-party app and you can just weigh things!” Like no sh*t it’s not gonna work…

The comments are just hilarious :rofl: :

This app is very useless!!! It doesn’t weigh out things I need weight out like drugs!!!

However, sometimes leaning so heavily into the “normies are all just dumber than we are” thinking is not conducive towards a solution, and positions privacy and tech as the only measures of intelligence. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have so many security leaks from those who lead the countries we all live in. This is why I am glad that PG exists and is taking the inclusive approach of not making this assumption:

That said, there doesn’t seem to be a high incentive to truly train people on these mental models and to most, they have been sold that just using software is all that is necessary to prosper in the digital age while lacking awareness of how much they are exploited. The growing numbers of disgruntled tech folk who can educate the zeitgeist is growing in this technofeudalistic system (to avoid use of the overloaded term of capitalism), and we are the ones that need to not only make the materials, but make it sexy (think of the “truth” campaign but aimed at exploitative industries mainly tech).

Great follow up to this. I think I’ll try to post these up as I see them and encourage others to do the same. I personally will try to avoid the tech elitist mentality approaching these as I think a lot of this ignorance is by passive design to keep the consumer class unaware of how much they are being exploited.