A nurse administers a COVID-19 vaccine shot at a mass vaccination clinic run by Switch Health in Mississauga, Ont., on Dec. 24, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
A nurse administers a COVID-19 vaccine shot at a mass vaccination clinic run by Switch Health in Mississauga, Ont., on Dec. 24, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, Switch Health, a medical testing and technology startup, secured provincial and federal contracts to conduct testing for COVID-19. Earlier this month, social media posts claimed that Anaida Poilievre, the wife of federal Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, was the founder and CEO of Switch Health. This is false. There is no evidence to suggest that Anaida Poilievre has had any involvement with Switch Health and the claim’s sole source, ChatGPT, is known to produce false information and fabricate links to outside sources.
A video featuring far-right activist Chris Saccoccia, who also goes by Chris Sky, appears to have been posted to his first before being reposted on and other platforms. In the video, Saccoccia said ChatGPT “pulled up an article from Forbes and an article from Global Newswire that showed that the CEO of Switch Health in 2020 was none other than Anaida Poilievre, Pierre Poilievre's wife.†He later said the links provided by the artificial intelligence chat bot were “scrubbed from the internet.†The post has been liked and retweeted thousands of times on Twitter.
Rating: False
There is no evidence that Anaida Poilievre has been involved with Switch Health.
"These claims are clearly and unequivocally false," Pierre Poilievre's office said in a statement. "Mrs. Poilievre has had no affiliation whatsoever with Switch Health."
According to a and a on her Twitter account, Anaida Poilievre's work history includes time spent as a parliamentary affairs adviser in the Senate of Canada before moving on to work for Conservative MP Michael Cooper in 2015. She is also the co-founder of the lifestyle website .
When reached for comment, Switch Health confirmed that Dilian Stoyanov is the founding and current CEO of the company. The company's also lists Marc Thomson and Mary Langley as co-founders.
A from Sept. 14, 2020, identifies Stoyanov as the company’s CEO and doesn’t mention Anaida Poilievre.
Inaccuracies and fabricated links
In under the video, Saccoccia provided a screenshot apparently taken from a conversation with ChatGPT. While the prompt from the user is not shown, ChatGPT’s response incorrectly states that Anaida Poilievre is the “CEO and founder of Switch Health.â€
In the same response, the artificial intelligence tool incorrectly identifies Anaida Poilievre as Pierre Poilievre’s sister.
That post and a on March 6 provides a list of links to articles that supposedly tie Anaida Poilievre to Switch Health.
All of the links lead to error pages or to other, unrelated stories. None of the linked articles appear in the , which has more than 800 billion time-stamped web pages saved on its servers.
ChatGPT has limitations
ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is an artificial intelligence language model trained to produce text. It was released to the public by developer OpenAI, a research and deployment company, in November 2022 and has since exploded in popularity.
Users are warned that the tool has limitations, including that it might .
ChatGPT is , and it to provide fabricated links to websites that lead nowhere. This is a flaw in many artificial intelligence systems in which the artificial intelligence confidently creates something with no basis in the real world.
ChatGPT can be manipulated to provide factually incorrect responses. One Twitter user posted a of a ChatGPT interaction in which the tool incorrectly claimed that Saccoccia was the CEO of Switch Health and provided fabricated links as proof.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said in an email that the company is working to address the issue.
On March 14, OpenAI released its latest version of the large language model, GPT-4. It is available with a paid subscription through ChatGPT, and its creators have said it Ҡthan its predecessor.
Controversial figure
Saccoccia is well-known within anti-mask and anti-COVID-19 mandate circles. Since the pandemic’s outset, he has travelled the country speaking at rallies, and has been several times and charged with criminal offences, including . The allegations are still before the court and have not been proved.
On March 15, Saccoccia posted to Twitter that showed a letter from Pierre Poilievre’s lawyers asking for a retraction of the false statements about Anaida Poilievre and Switch Health.
The letter, which was provided to ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø by Pierre Poilievre's office for review, says the statements in Saccoccia's posts are false and "intended simply to disparage Mr. and Mrs. Poilievre without any regard for reality."
Sources
Claim can be found on Twitter (, ), () and (, ), and in an archived TikTok
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