Enlarge (credit: Elena Lacey | Getty Images) In October 2019, Idaho proposed changing its Medicaid program. The state needed approval from the federal government, which solicited public feedback via Medicaid.gov. Roughly 1,000 comments arrived. But half came not from concerned citizens or even Internet trolls. They were generated by artificial intelligence. And a study found that people could not distinguish the real comments from the fake ones. The project was the work of Max Weiss, a tech-savvy medical student at Harvard, but it received little attention at the time.