Publication Date

9-2025

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Issues in Information Systems

Volume

26

Issue

1

DOI

10.48009/1_iis_119

First Page

250

Last Page

264

Abstract

This use case reports on the impressive output, hallucinations, instability, and limitations of three Large Language Models (LLMs): ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. The LLMs were prompted in an investigative sequence and responses checked. The collected information supports the common theory that chronic wasting disease (CWD) in North America originated in 1967 at a research facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, where deer were reported to have been exposed to sheep with a similar disease - scrapie. Findings include that: no sheep with scrapie were detected in the area around Fort Collins prior to 1967; domestic sheep reportedly exposed to scrapie were in the facility; there were medical experiments; Fort Collins was active in the scrapie eradication program; three early infection sites, all linked to Fort Collins, are missing from USGS maps showing the disease history; the recently discovered European CWD cases can be explained by local conditions; scrapie in sheep and deer with CWD symptoms were reported centuries ago in Europe; early models simulating disease history lacked adequate data and detail, and ignored the presence of infected captive herds. The LLMs provided good insight into disease simulation, created simulation models, and generated python code.

Keywords

chronic wasting disease etiology, Fort Collins theory, disease simulation, large language model performance, artificial intelligence use case

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Department

Information Systems and Technology

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