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Artificial Intelligence Simulation of Adolescents’ Responses to Vaping-Prevention Messages. Research Letter. JAMA Pediatr. Published online March 25, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.0274

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2816153

“Artificial intelligence (AI) may not only improve patient care and clinical outcomes but also transform preventive medicine. Researchers currently spend millions of dollars—and participants spend thousands of hours—testing the persuasiveness of health messages. We performed 2 studies testing whether the large language module (LLM) GPT-4.0 (OpenAI) could simulate adolescents’ responses to vaping-prevention campaigns and quickly and efficiently identify the most effective messages to address the public health crisis of adolescent vaping.”

“AI accurately simulated adolescents’ ratings of the effectiveness of vaping-prevention messages, in both text-only and text-plus-image formats…. Researchers and practitioners often face difficult decisions about which messages and images to use in health campaigns. The AI protocol developed here could facilitate pilot testing of a large number of text and image variations quickly and at very low cost and lead to meaningful improvements in the impact of health communications.”

Comment: Communicating effective vaping-prevention messages to adolescents can be time-consuming and expensive. Using AI to pilot test messages provides a new means to ensure effective communication with adolescents. Stephen Hamann