Too many people turn to Chatgpt for a medical diagnosis: why you have to stop

Chatgpt

Chatgpt is the Openai chatbot, based on the GPT artificial intelligence model, making it possible to answer all kinds of questions or requests. Available in free online version.

• Downloads:
  12341
• Release date:
  05/09/2025
• Author :
  OPENAI
• License:
  Free license
• Categories:
  

  IA

• Operating system:
  

  Android, online service, Windows 10/11, iOS iPhone / iPad, MacOS (Apple Silicon)
  

Except that AI often broadcasts False information with total confidencehence significant risks to use Chatgpt as a doctor. The University of Oxford has conducted an investigation that shows that users are also struggling to provide relevant information to guide medical recommendations.

AI is not your friend for medical decisions

“The study revealed a break in bidirectional communication,” explains Adam Mahdi, director of higher education at the Oxford Internet Institute and co-author of the study. “People using these agents did not make better decisions than participants based on traditional methods such as online research or their own judgment.”

The research was carried out with 1,300 British participants who analyzed scenarios imagined by doctors. Their mission was to identify possible health problems and determine whether these concerns requested medical consultation or hospitalization based on several tools, including AI.

The participants tested GPT-4O of Openai, Command R+ of Cohere and Llama 3 of Meta. According to the study, the AI ​​prevents participants from identifying the relevant health problems, but even worse, pushed them to underestimate the severity of certain medical scenarios.

Adam Mahdi stresses that participants often omit essential details in requests and received answers to complicated interpretation: “The answers they obtained frequently combined good and bad recommendations. Current evaluation methods of conversational agents do not reflect the complexity of interactions with human users.”

The study is published while the medical community turns more and more towards AI, As if to identify the biological age of a patient or Identify a possible breast cancer in advance. Companies are also based on this technology for consumer health monitoring like Apple, Amazon or Microsoft.

The American medical association strongly advises against doctors to use AI for medical decisions and developers warn against diagnostics of their chatbots.

“We recommend relying on reliable sources of information for health decisions,” concludes Adam Mahdi. “These systems should be tested in the real world before being deployed, as in clinical trials for new drugs.”