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As more people turn to AI chatbots for quick, 24/7 medical advice, a new perspective paper co-authored by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York, explores the risks of this practice that are largely invisible to users—and health care systems.

The paper, written by researchers at Binghamton University, Stanford University, Texas A&M University and Indiana University and published in Nature Health, examines what happens when a chatbot gives someone bad health advice.

The authors argue that the harm is hard to detect because the conversation stays on the AI company's platform, the person has no place to report the problem and outside researchers cannot measure the damage.

"We're getting medical advice from these chatbots, but nobody—literally no one—is looking at this. If there's an error or an issue, there's just no way for people to know," said Kaicheng Yang, an assistant professor in the School of Computing at Binghamton University's Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science and one of the paper's authors.

The researchers gave the example of a 60-year-old man who asked ChatGPT how to cut chloride from his diet and replaced table salt with sodium bromide. The man was hospitalized with bromide toxicity after experiencing hallucinations and paranoia.

The paper highlights that because the man received this advice from a chatbot and was unable to retrieve the conversation, his doctors had no way of knowing exactly what he was told, making it nearly impossible to piece together what happened.

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