Final yr, ChatGPT handed the US Medical Licensing Examination and was reported to be “extra empathetic” than actual medical doctors. ChatGPT at the moment has round 180 million customers; if a mere 10% of them have requested ChatGPT a medical query, that’s already a inhabitants two instances bigger than New York Metropolis utilizing ChatGPT like a physician. There’s an ongoing explosion of medical chatbot startups constructing skinny wrappers round ChatGPT to dole out medical recommendation. However ChatGPT shouldn’t be a physician, and utilizing ChatGPT for medical recommendation shouldn’t be solely towards OpenAI’s Utilization insurance policies, it may be harmful.
On this article, I establish 4 key issues with utilizing present general-purpose chatbots to reply patient-posed medical questions. I present examples of every drawback utilizing actual conversations with ChatGPT. I additionally clarify why constructing a chatbot that may safely reply patient-posed questions is totally completely different than constructing a chatbot that may reply USMLE questions. Lastly, I describe steps that everybody can take — sufferers, entrepreneurs, medical doctors, and firms like OpenAI — to make chatbots medically safer.
Notes
For readability I exploit the time period “ChatGPT,” however the article applies to all publicly out there general-purpose massive language fashions (LLMs), together with ChatGPT, GPT-4, Llama2, Gemini, and others. A couple of LLMs particularly designed for drugs do exist, like Med-PaLM; this text shouldn’t be about these fashions. I’m targeted right here on on general-purpose chatbots as a result of (a) they’ve essentially the most customers; (b) they’re straightforward to entry; and (c) many sufferers are already utilizing them for medical recommendation.
Within the chats with ChatGPT, I present verbatim quotes of ChatGPT’s response, with ellipses […] to point materials that was unnoticed for brevity. I by no means unnoticed something that may’ve modified my evaluation of ChatGPT’s response. For completeness, the total chat transcripts are offered in a Phrase doc hooked up to the tip of this text. The phrases “Affected person:” and “ChatGPT:” are dialogue tags and have been added afterwards for readability. These dialogue tags weren’t a part of the prompts or responses.