'Dr. Google' meets its match: Dr. ChatGPT

As a fourth-year ophthalmology resident at Emory University School of Medicine, Dr. Riley Lyons' biggest responsibilities include triage: When a patient comes in with an eye-related complaint, Lyons must make an immediate assessment of its urgency. He often finds patients have already turned to "Dr. Online, Lyons said, they are likely to find that "any number of terrible things could be going on based on the symptoms that they're experiencing." So, when two of Lyons' fellow ophthalmologists at Emory came to him and suggested evaluating the accuracy of the AI chatbot ChatGPT in diagnosing eye-related complaints, he jumped at the chance. In June, Lyons and his colleagues reported in medRxiv, an online publisher of preliminary health science studies, that ChatGPT compared quite well to human doctors who reviewed the same symptoms -- and performed vastly better than the symptom checker on the popular health website WebMD. And despite the much-publicized "hallucination" problem known to ...