The findings raise questions about when, how, and to what extent AI enhances public health communications. "Comparing a chatbot to nothing isn't really a fair test. The interesting question is whether it does better than what public health agencies already have out there. In our study, it didn't," says Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Research Associate Professor in Computer and Information Science (CIS) and the study's senior author.

Described in a paper in JAMA Network Open, the trial—which included nearly 1,300 participants in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—found that skeptical parents who interacted with the chatbots were more likely than those who received no intervention to say they intended to immunize their children.

But spending a few minutes reading standard written materials provided online about the benefits of the HPV vaccine from governmental health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) produced essentially the same effect.

"It would have been easy to compare an AI chatbot with no intervention or a very weak control condition and find a positive result," says Neil Sehgal, a doctoral student in CIS and the study's first author. "But we wanted to know whether the chatbot added value beyond what public health agencies already provide."

The promise and challenge of AI for public health