In puzzling outbreak, officials look to cold beer, gross ice, and ChatGPT

Source: Ars Technica

An AI assist?

The author of the MMWR report, county health official Katherine Houser, noted that the beer‑tent workers were hesitant to give details because they didn’t want to get any of their community members in trouble. One let slip that someone had put leftover food in the cooler overnight at the start of the fair.

The county health officials hypothesized that the cooler had become contaminated with Salmonella that spread to beer cans from which people then drank, allowing for infection. With the makeshift cooler gone, it remained only a hypothesis. The health investigators then turned to ChatGPT for assistance.

After providing the chatbot with details of the outbreak, investigators asked several questions, including:

• “Will S. Agbeni grow in an improperly drained cooler?”
• “Are any other sources, other than ice, likely if only canned beverages and no foods were available at this location?”
• “What examples of similar outbreaks have been documented in scientific literature?”

Some of the questions are easy to answer without a chatbot. A simple search on PubMed quickly pulls up examples of Salmonella being found in ice. However, the chatbot assured officials that the cooler was a “credible and likely” source of the outbreak, and they stuck with the hypothesis.

In the end, officials required new cooler sanitation protocols—and concluded that the AI assistance was helpful. “AI was effective in this rural setting for rapid situational awareness,” Houser wrote. She also acknowledged potential concerns of using AI for outbreak investigations: “Given the inherent limitations of generative AI tools, including potential inaccuracies and lack of source transparency, all AI‑generated summaries were critically reviewed and validated against primary literature before incorporation,” she wrote.

Overall, the case report has a murky ending. It’s unclear how helpful the chatbot actually was. Critically reviewing AI‑generated answers can take as much time as researching the answer independently. The new cooler sanitation protocols seem like a good idea, regardless.