A man in a white coat says he has spent years recommending "Hyalethinap Plus Pro Max" to his patients. According to him, the product helps the body generate anti-ageing molecules and fights hair loss, brittle nails, weakening skin, and joint pain. The problem isn't only that the man is not a doctor: he doesn't exist. Nor, it seems, does the product.
It is one of the cases identified by Hallam, a British digital marketing agency that analysed 1,198 videos appearing among the top TikTok results for searches related to health, finance, and education. Among the health content examined, 40 per cent of the videos had been generated or assisted by artificial intelligence. For the search term "health tips" that figure rose to 84 per cent. The leading AI-produced health and medical videos in the sample had averaged 2.5 million views each.
Some avatars claimed that sleeping near your phone, using deodorants, or heating food in plastic could cause cancer. Others proposed Coca-Cola and onion as a remedy for pain. Technology makes it cheap to produce false information, but above all it makes it possible to generate everything that should make it credible: the mature face, the white coat, the confident voice, the clinical vocabulary, and even an invented professional history.
The research does not describe the platform as a whole. Hallam selected the top fifty results for a series of search terms and remains an agency with commercial interests, not an independent academic body. TikTok has disputed the study's representativeness and stated that it removes harmful health misinformation, including when it is AI-generated. The examples submitted by the Guardian were taken down. The platform also requires realistic AI-generated content to be labelled as such.
The label, however, solves only part of the problem. On social media, authority has always been a performance: a tone, a camera angle, an outfit, a title displayed on screen. AI has turned that staging into an unlimited resource. You no longer need to find a real doctor willing to sell a false cure. You can invent the cure, the doctor, and the patients he claims to have treated, all at once.
