Warning over use in UK of unregulated AI chatbots to create social care plans

Britain's hard-pressed carers need all the help they can get. But that should not include using unregulated AI bots, according to researchers who say the AI revolution in social care needs a hard ethical edge. A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said.