AI for good? Expanding our understanding of opinion leaders in a changing digital landscape

Title : AI for good? Expanding our understanding of opinion leaders in a changing digital landscape

Abstract:

Background: There is strong evidence of the impact of opinion leaders in health promotion programs. Early work by Burke-Garcia suggests that social media influencers are the “opinion leaders” of the digital age because they come from the communities they seek to influence and have built trust with them. Burke-Garcia’s work suggests that influencers may be key to disseminating credible and timely health information and prompting consideration of protective health behaviors.

Program background: There is a lot of bad news right now about the emergence of AI, LLMs, and other related technologies, specifically how it drives the spread of inaccurate health information and impacts people’s ability to discern what is true and what is not. However, AI technology can also be used for good – and is perhaps one of the more powerful tools that we have in our public health toolbox to promote human health and wellbeing.

Evaluation Methods and Results: AI can be a tool to inform and educate on specific issues in the moment – and can do it at a scale that can compete against all the other messages out there. But health experts must be present in the conversation – or leverage others to be part of the conversation – and the messages have to be personalized and empathetic. This mimics what we know about influencers and how they approach communicating with their communities. And there is early research that supports this – that individuals often prefer AI responses to human responses, and that they are drawn to empathetic AI responses.

Conclusions: Blending what we know about social media influencers as opinion leaders – the relationships with their following, how they build trust, and how they message health topics – with the power and scale of AI – can enable us to tackle the huge health challenges we are facing. This presentation will review what we know about social media influencers as digital opinion leaders and these emerging AI technologies to propose the development of something we are calling, Health Communication AI – perhaps the newest form of  “opinion leader” for health promotion programming.

Implications for research and/or practice: Health Communication AI requires reimagining what it means to communicate about health today. We must approach health communication with compassion and empathy and meet people’s expectations for more tailored and more personalized health-related information. Blending what we know about opinion leadership with advances in AI technology can help us achieve this aim of accurately informing and educating the public about health at scale.

Biography:

Dr. Amelia Burke-Garcia is a seasoned health communications professional with over 20 years of experience in health communication program planning, implementation, and evaluation. At NORC, she leads the organization's Center for Health Communication Science, in which role, she designs and implements strategies that leverage the science of communication to influence behavior. Over the course of her career, Dr. Burke-Garcia has spearheaded some of the most innovative communication initiatives including the award-winning How Right Now campaign, CDC’s National Influenza Vaccination campaign, and working with MeetUp groups and the Waze mobile application in support of flu vaccination and HIV testing. She has been examining the role of influencers in health communication for more than a decade, and most recently, expanded this work to develop what she is calling, “Health Communication AI.” Dr. Burke-Garcia is the author of two books and numerous papers. She has been highlighted by the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, for her work in honor of Women’s History Month and has been named to Very Well Health’s list of 10 Modern Female Innovators Shaking Up Health Care. She is a Founding Member of the Society for Health Communication and serves as Chair-Elect of the Board of Directors for the non-profit, Vaccinate Your Family. She earned her bachelor’s from McGill University, her master’s from Georgetown University, and her PhD from George Mason University.