What Did AI and Beer Have to Do With a Salmonella Outbreak?

The world of public health can get complicated at times and, like other scientific disciplines, it involves solving a number of mysteries. Last week, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report revealed an especially daunting problem: analyzing a 2024 county fair held in Brown County, Illinois where between seven and 13 attendees subsequently fell ill with salmonella.

According to the report, the people affected by the outbreak had only one thing in common: they had all consumed beer that had been stored in a cooler full of ice. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a cold beer on a hot summer’s day, but when it puts you at risk of developing salmonella, that’s where things get a little more complicated.

From reading the report, it certainly looks like the Brown County Health Department did their due diligence in exploring all possible angles for how these people became ill. They found that four of the affected people did not buy food at the fair; of the affected people, four had also not used the portable restrooms there. Two of the people who later fell sick even brought their own hand sanitizer to the fair and used it.

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In analyzing the possible culprits, the health department then consulted artificial intelligence on the matter – specifically, ChatGPT. In the report published in the MMWR, author Katherine E. Houser notes that ChatGPT told investigators “that ice contamination is often an overlooked transmission vector” for salmonella.

Nonetheless, as Ars Technica’s Beth Mole pointed out, there’s also a larger question here: why did AI need to be brought into the mix at all? “It’s unclear how helpful the chatbot actually was in this case,” Mole writes, observing that most of the details about salmonella spreading through ice are publicly available. And it raises the question of where a hallucinated response might have taken this particular line of inquiry.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…