AI for Good? Expanding Our Understanding of Opinion Leaders in A Changing Digital Landscape
This webinar is part of the NYSPHA Mental Health Webinar Series sponsored by The JED Foundation, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention - Capital Region Chapter, the University of Albany College of Integrated Health Sciences, the New York State Office of Mental Health, and the American Public Health Association - Mental Health Section.
There is strong evidence of the impact of opinion leaders in health promotion programs. Moreover, early work by Burke-Garcia suggests that social media influencers are the “opinion leaders” of the digital age as they come from the communities they influence and have built trust with them. Additional work done by Burke-Garcia suggests that they may be useful in disseminating credible and timely health information and prompting consideration of health behaviors.
Currently, there is a lot of bad news right now about the emergence of AI, LLMs, generative AI, and emotive AI – and how it is driving the spread of health misinformation and impacting people’s ability to know what is true and what is not. But this technology also can also be used for good. 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.
Emerging research indicates that individuals often prefer AI-generated responses over human ones, particularly empathetic AI interactions. By 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 tackle the big challenges we are facing.
This session will merge what we know about social media influencers as digital opinion leaders with these emerging technologies to propose the development of something we are calling Health Communication AI – perhaps the newest form of “opinion leader” – to do just this.
Learning Objectives:
Following this session, participants will be able to:
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Discuss health theories that support use of AI in health communication
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Summarize AI qualities that make it work for health communication
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Describe opportunities for using AI in public health and mental health programs
Speaker
Dr. Amelia Burke-Garcia is a seasoned health communications professional with 20 years of experience in health communication program planning, implementation, and evaluation. At NORC at the University of Chicago, she leads the Center for Health Communication Science and the Digital Strategy and Outreach Program Area. In these roles, she designs and implements strategies that leverage communication science to influence behavior effectively.
Throughout her career, Dr. Burke-Garcia has spearheaded numerous innovative communication programs and studies on a variety of health topics. Since 2020, she has directed the award-winning How Right Now/Qué Hacer Ahora campaign, which aims to enhance people's ability to cope and build resilience. Her work has also included collaborations with MeetUp groups to promote flu vaccination and with the Waze mobile application to encourage HIV testing. Additionally, she has spent over a decade examining the role of influencers in health communication and has recently expanded her focus to explore how AI can transform health communication.
Dr. Burke-Garcia is the author of two books: Influencing Health: A Comprehensive Guide to Working with Social Media Influencers and Communicating Through a Pandemic: A Chronicle of Experiences, Lessons Learned, and a Vision for the Future. Her contributions have earned recognition from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy during Women’s History Month, as well as inclusion in VeryWellHealth.com’s list of "10 Modern Female Innovators Shaking Up Health Care."
She is a founding member of the Society for Health Communication and serves on the Board of Directors for Vaccinate Your Family. Dr. Burke-Garcia holds a bachelor’s degree in International Development Studies and Humanistic Studies from McGill University, a master’s degree in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University, and a PhD in Communication from George Mason University.
Thank you to our Mental Health Webinar Series sponsors:
