How AI Threatens Your Health

And how to protect yourself and your loved ones

I rarely comment on current events, but what I am going to share with you in this post is extremely important. I believe that choices you make in the coming months to a year will be vital to ensuring your health and, perhaps even more so, your wealth.

Jim Laird recently showed me an AI software that can be used to generate content in health and wellness space. This was prompted by a recent Jordan Peterson interview in which Peterson reported the staggeringly accurate and rapid content creation capacity of an AI software. Jim tells me that not only can these AI platforms generate text-based blog posts, but if you provide them with video footage of yourself, they can create video and audio content to go with it.

He suggested that I could use this software to help me write blog posts - not to completely trust the AI, but just to use it as a basis or template for creating posts.

My first reaction to this suggestion was revulsion. The idea that I would outsource my content creation to a bot disturbs me on a visceral level.

But I decided to at least see how good the bot was. So Jim had it generate a blog post about cold therapy. The bot did a pretty good job, but after reading the article it generated, my overall impression was, "this is just what everyone else is doing."

But the problem with that is that everyone is doing what is working. So what works in health and wellness blogging? Cranking out content that appears valuable, offering just enough information that people keep coming back for more. This is monetized by selling people products based on that information. There's nothing wrong with this, but what I've realized through the years is that most of the information being put out there in the health and wellness space is just derived from someone else's original thoughts. Today you can take an ebook that someone spent years writing or a blog post that someone spent months researching, copy-paste it into a text file, and pass it off as your own work. You can also hire ghost writers from all over the world to crank out content that is optimized for discovery by Google, to get your site ranked over everyone else.

Given how easy it is to have a blog, podcast, video channel, and social media presence, it only makes sense that most of the content out there is absolutely unoriginal. And after all, what we're blogging about today people have been writing about for 100's of years.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that, as I read this AI-generated blog post, I realized that the information is good enough to entice you to keep reading it, but it provides almost zero value. It's fluff. It's good enough to sell you a bunch of products, but it's NOT what you need most.

What you need most is a ground-up understanding of what it means to be healthy. What you need is to learn how to live as healthy a life as possible.

This, in and of itself, is not such a big problem. Sure, there's a lot of fluff out there. So what? It's not like it's hurting anyone, right? It's just not making a big impact on anyone's health.

The real problem is what is going to happen when these bots are unleashed in massive waves of automated disinformation campaigns.

If the passion of my life is to help people to be healthy, then the subject of my most intense study has been the mechanisms by which evil people destroy health. They always do so to make money.

Here is what will happen with these bots. Unscrupulous corporations will hire corporations (that they may indirectly own) to generate massive AI-generated publicity campaigns. Imagine a world where 9/10 wellness blogs are just bots saying what they are told to say. Add to this AI-generated art that can lead you to think that a real person is running that blog. Imagine a world where a bot can masquerade as a doctor, complete with videos and blog posts, and never get caught. And as these bots get going, they will create a self-reinforcing consensus of the truth.

Consensus is about to be radically hijacked by unscrupulous people using armies of bots.

These unscrupulous people, using armies of bots and automated software, will create consensus on the internet as to what is true in a way never before seen. Likewise, the engineers of these weapons of mass-disinformation will make sure that their bots NEVER incorporate opinions that will be harmful to their objectives.

The Matrix is here, and it doesn't look like it did in the movie. It is a web of AI-generated content automated and then duplicated ad nauseum, to create the illusion of consensus, and designed to funnel you into buying products that may even be harmful to your health. A very small number of financiers and software engineers can, with software like this, engineer the appearance of consensus on the internet, and how would you ever figure it out?

The truth is that the only people in a position to call out lies that are commonly peddled in health and wellness as truths are people who actually come into contact with the clinical realities of regular patients.

That is, people like myself and Jim Laird. We can read some AI-generated blog post and know in an instant if it is worth reading, sharing, or acting upon.

Even experts in health and wellness are going to be fooled by this, because most of them do not actually see patients.

"The only source of knowledge is experience."

- Albert Einstein

"By practice alone, you can become an expert."

- William Osler

One of the most powerful logical fallacies that people easily fall prey to is the appeal to consensus. If you perceive a consensus, you are apt to fall into line with that consensus. As in, if everyone around you votes Democrat, you'll likely end up voting Democrat. If everyone around you says cold-therapy helps you lose weight, you'll believe it too and you may try it to lose weight. But, as just one example, cold therapy isn't honestly that important or powerful when it comes to losing weight. Moreover, you won't lose weight with cold therapy if you are making other, more fundamental mistakes, such as eating the wrong macros, not eating enough protein, living in too much artificial light, and so on and so forth.

This is why the fundamentals are baked into my two most important blog posts - my daily routine and my guide to biohacking.

I remember a time, not long ago, when you could find not good, but GREAT information about natural medicine just by Googling it.

These days, when I Google a medical topic that I'm curious about, I have to sift through a long list of results that are 80% half-truths or even 100% outright lies. Yes, I use DuckDuckGo, I use StartPage - I've tried a lot of alternative search engines to try to get around the problem that is Google's censorship. There just isn't a good independent search engine out there that can out-perform Google. All of them are based on Google.

This has happened over the past two years. Within the health and wellness industry, we've all seen it. The censorship is real and it is only getting worse.

What will the end result of this be? In the past, lies have had a way of correcting themselves thanks to negative feedback within the public square. With digitization, all you have to do is create enough digital noise or gain access to and alter the digital data (like drug treatment trial data), and you can completely change history. Add in the fact that so much of our communication today is electronic, and you have the perfect storm for creating consensus online based on nothing but a swarm of bots all posting content that is based on what a bunch of other bots are saying.

You thought the gaslighting and censorship of the past two years was bad?

It is going to get much, much worse. This is a major problem, but this post is running a bit too long. In part two, I will be explaining exactly what I think people should do to insolate themselves from the threat of AI.

Until then, be well, and try not to worry too much about the state of the world,

Dr. Stillman