Evaluating the quality of medical content on YouTube using large language models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
YouTube has become a dominant source of medical information and health-related decision-making. Yet, many videos on this platform contain inaccurate or biased information. Although expert reviews could help mitigate this situation, the vast number of daily uploads makes this solution impractical. In this study, we explored the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assess the quality of medical content on YouTube. We collected a set of videos previously evaluated by experts and prompted twenty models to rate their quality using the DISCERN instrument. We then analyzed the inter-rater agreement between the language models' and experts' ratings using Brennan-Prediger's (BP) Kappa. We found that LLMs exhibited a wide range of inter-rater agreements with the experts (ranging from -1.10 to 0.82). All models tended to give higher scores than the human experts. The agreement on individual questions tended to be lower, with some questions showing significant disagreement between models and experts. Including scoring guidelines in the prompt has improved model performance. We conclude that some LLMs are capable of evaluating the quality of medical videos. If used as stand-alone expert systems or embedded into traditional recommender systems, these models can mitigate the quality issue of health-related online videos.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.093 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".