AI Chatbots Can Diagnose Medical Problems in Patients, Better Than Real Doctors

 The ENEMY advances....

Benjamin Tolchin, a neurologist and ethicist at Yale University, is used to seeing patients who searched for their symptoms on the Internet before coming to see him—a practice doctors have long tried to discourage. “Dr. Google” is notoriously lacking in context and prone to pulling up unreliable sources.

But in recent months Tolchin has begun seeing patients who are using a new, far more powerful tool for self-diagnosis: artificial intelligence chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the latest version of Microsoft’s search engine Bing (which is based on OpenAI’s software) and Google’s Med-PaLM. Trained on text across the Internet, these large language models (LLMs) predict the next word in a sequence to answer questions in a humanlike style. Faced with a critical shortage of health care workers, researchers and medical professionals hope that bots can step in to help answer people’s questions. Initial tests by researchers suggest these AI programs are far more accurate than a Google search. Some researchers predict that within the year, a major medical center will announce a collaboration using LLM chatbots to interact with patients and diagnose disease.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-chatbots-can-diagnose-medical-conditions-at-home-how-good-are-they/