ChatGPT is poised to upend medical information. For better and worse.

Blinken warns China that assisting Russia with Ukraine would be a'serious problem' Supreme Court hears defense of President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan Ukraine forces claim to have'repelled' Russia's attacks on Bakhmut region It's almost hard to remember a time before people could turn to "Dr. Some of the information was wrong. Much of it was terrifying. But it helped empower patients who could, for the first time, research their own symptoms and learn more about their conditions. Now, ChatGPT and similar language processing tools promise to upend medical care again, providing patients with more data than a simple online search and explaining conditions and treatments in language nonexperts can understand. For clinicians, these chatbots might provide a brainstorming tool, guard against mistakes and relieve some of the burden of filling out paperwork, which could alleviate burnout and allow more facetime with patients. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning. But – and it's a big "but" – the information these digital assistants provide might be more inaccurate and misleading than basic internet searches. "I see no potential for it in medicine," said Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. By their very design, these large-language technologies are inappropriate sources of medical information, she said. Others argue that large language models could supplement, though not replace, primary care. "A human in the loop is still very much needed," said Katie Link, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, a company that develops collaborative machine learning tools. Link, who specializes in health care and biomedicine, thinks chatbots will be useful in medicine someday, but it isn't yet ready. And whether this technology should be available to patients, as well as doctors and researchers, and how much it should be regulated remain open questions. Regardless of the debate, there's little doubt such technologies are coming – and fast. ChatGPT launched its research preview on a Monday in December. By that Wednesday, it reportedly already had 1 million users. Earlier this month, both Microsoft and Google announced plans to include AI programs similar to ChatGPT in their search engines. "The idea that we would tell patients they shouldn't use these tools seems implausible.