An AI tool called Waldo, reviewed more than 43,000 past posts on Reddit forums that were related to cannabis (drug) use. It flags posts and over 28,000 other posts have been flagged as potentially unexpected or harmful side effects. The researchers checked 250 of the posts Waldo had flagged and 86% did represent a problematic experience with cannabis products (report September 30 in PLOS Digital Health). If this method was used more often, the information could help public health workers protect consumers from harmful products.
Richard Lomotey (an information technology expert at Penn State) stated, “the beauty of the work is that it shows researchers can actually gain information from sources that government agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention may not be looking at. The CDC and other agencies take surveys or collect self reported side effects of illnesses but do not monitor social media.”
Many people do not have access to a doctor or don’t know about the official way to report a bad experience with a product, said by John Ayers, a public health researcher at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla who worked on Waldo. Lots of people share health experiences online. “We need to go where they are,” he says.
To construct Waldo, the team began with a smaller group of 10,000 different Reddit posts about cannabis use. Other researchers had gone through and identified the problematic side effects by hand. Colleagues trained Waldo on a portion of these posts, then tested it on the remaining ones. On this task, Waldo had outperformed ChatGPT. The general-purposed bot marked it 18 times more false than positive, demonstrating posts contained side effects when they didn’t. However, it did not outperform human reviewers.
The question that still remains is if Waldo would work as well searching for issues related to any kind of drugs, vitamins or other product, Lomotey says. AI tools trained on one task may not work as well on similar tasks. “We have to be cautious,” he states.
Hopefully, one day Waldo can link the connection with people who need help online and the public health workers who can provide help.
Link:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-health-side-effects-social-media
