AI Powers Persuasive Health Messages, Real-Time Campaigns

AI can help public health agencies in the quest to end HIV. The United States is pursuing an initiative to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. To achieve this goal, public health agencies and organizations must remind the public about how best to avoid transmitting and acquiring the virus. Public health campaigns are costly, their effectiveness is seldom systematically assessed, and no systematic methods have been developed to build health campaigns in real-time. Dolores Albarracin and colleagues collected public health messages about HIV prevention and testing from US federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and HIV/STI researchers posting on social media. AI was then used to classify those that were actionable, relevant to men who have sex with men, and effective. An online experiment with men who have sex with men, and a field experiment with public health agencies showed that the classification model was successful in picking persuasive public heath messages. Specifically, posts selected by the AI classifier were six times more likely to be selected for reposting by government and community agencies in US counties than general posts about HIV prevention—and the target audience expressed greater interest in sharing AI-selected posts online. According to the authors, community-based organizations can save time and money by using AI to select publicly available public health messages to repost, allowing the organizations to share messages about prevention and testing more often.