[Re: https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/mhealth-innovate-21-why-are-health-work... ]
Neil says, with reference to ChatGPT and other chatbots, "For anyone with an internet connection it is now possible to ask basic (and advanced) healthcare questions and the responses can be expected to be very accurate - not 100%, but approaching this, dependent on context."
This is unfortunately not the case with generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT. You simply can’t trust a chatbot to answer a factual question reliably:
- Elizabeth Lopatto examined the use of generative AI to answer the question, “How many presidents have pardoned their relatives? ( https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313222/chatgpt-pardon-biden-bush-es... ). She tried it out on a number of chatbots and received quick, confident, but wildly differing and completely wrong answers from all of them.
- A Norwegian man has filed a complaint after ChatGPT falsely told him he had killed two of his sons and been jailed for 21 years (https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/case-against-chatgpt-for-accusing-n...)
These and many other instances of chatbot hallucinations - which are always offered in the confident, neutral tone of voice adopted by generative AI, which is being called "botfo" - should give pause to anyone relying on the botfo for health advice.
Apart from plain errors of fact (often compounded by invented references to non-existent sources of evidence), the ethical basis of botfo is highly questionable. Just as botfo is a simulacrum of human speech, the ethics coded into AI are a simulacrum of human ethics. It’s a kind of binary ethics in which yes and no are the answers, rather than the human norm of true, false, both true and false, and neither true nor false. OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) published a revised version of its ethical framework a couple of months ago ( https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-02-12.html) , which trained ethicists find laughable ( https://www.theverge.com/openai/624209/chatgpt-ethics-specs-humanism ).
Beware of botfo!
Best,
Chris
Chris Zielinski
Centre for Global Health, University of Winchester, UK and
President, World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
Blogs; http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
Publications: http://www.researchgate.net and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/
HIFA profile: Chris Zielinski: As a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at the Centre for Global Health, University of Winchester, Chris leads the Partnerships in Health Information (Phi) programme, which supports knowledge development and brokers healthcare information exchanges of all kinds. He is President of the World Association of Medical Editors. Chris has held senior positions in publishing and knowledge management with WHO in Brazzaville, Geneva, Cairo and New Delhi, with FAO in Rome, ILO in Geneva, and UNIDO in Vienna. He served on WHO's Ethical Review Committee, and was an originator of the African Health Observatory. He also spent three years in London as Chief Executive of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society. Chris has been a director of the UK Copyright Licensing Agency, Educational Recording Agency, and International Association of Audiovisual Writers and Directors. He has served on the boards of several NGOs and ethics groupings (information and computer ethics and bioethics). chris AT chriszielinski.com. His publications are at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris-Zielinski and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/ and his blogs are http://ziggytheblue.wordrpress.com and https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ziggytheblue