If you are one of the millions of people who turn to ChatGPT or other chatbots to diagnose your illness, it’s better to hold back. A new study by researchers at the University of Oxford suggests that relying on artificial intelligence for medical decision-making can have dangerous consequences.
According to the BBC report, Oxford University researchers say that artificial intelligence models in the field of medicine give inconsistent and sometimes incorrect answers. Dr. Rebecca Payne, the study’s lead physician, warns that asking chatbots about symptoms can be dangerous.
In this study, which was conducted on 1,300 people, the participants were placed in different scenarios (such as severe headache or persistent fatigue after childbirth). The results showed that people who used artificial intelligence did not make better decisions than those who used traditional methods (such as Google searches).
The main problem here is that the AI may give three different diagnoses, leaving the user to guess the correct option. Dr. Adam Mehdi explains: “People give information to the chatbot gradually and don’t say everything; This is exactly where it breaks down.”
The dangers of medical advice with artificial intelligence
In this study, the researchers noticed a two-way communication failure between the user and the artificial intelligence. Users didn’t know what details the AI needed to provide accurate advice. On the other hand, the AI’s answers depended heavily on how the question was worded. “This analysis showed that interacting with humans is a major challenge even for advanced AI models,” the researchers said.
Unlike standard medical tests in which artificial intelligence gets a passing grade, in the real world and interacting with non-experts, these systems fail. Therefore, relying on them to decide whether to go to the general practitioner or the emergency room is a high risk.
Dr. Amber W. Childs of Yale University points out that because chatbots are trained with current medical data, they repeat the same biases and prejudices that have existed in medicine for decades. “A chatbot is only as good as the experienced clinicians who generated its data, which isn’t perfect,” he says.
However, some experts also believe that specialized medical prescriptions recently released by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic may have different results. The goal should be to improve technology with clear regulatory rules and medical guardrails to ensure patient safety.
The findings of this research have been published in the journal Nature Medicine.
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