{"id":372987,"date":"2026-04-10T13:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T13:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/372987\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T13:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T13:30:08","slug":"metas-new-ai-asked-for-my-raw-health-data-and-gave-me-terrible-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/372987\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta\u2019s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data\u2014and Gave Me Terrible Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Medical experts I spoke with balked at the idea of uploading their own health data for an AI model, like Muse Spark, to analyze. \u201cThese chatbots now allow you to connect your own biometric data, put in your own lab information, and honestly, that makes me pretty nervous,\u201d says Gauri Agarwal<\/a>, a doctor of medicine and associate professor at the University of Miami. \u201cI certainly wouldn’t connect my own health information to a service that I’m not fully able to control, understand where that information is being stored, or how it’s being utilized.\u201d She recommends people stick to lower-stakes, more general interactions, like prepping questions for your doctor.<\/p>\n

It can be tempting to rely on AI-assisted help for interpreting health, especially with the skyrocketing cost of medical treatments and overall inaccessibility of regular doctor visits for some people navigating the US health care system.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will be forgiven for going online and delegating what used to be a powerful, important personal relationship between a doctor and a patient\u2014to a robot,\u201d says Kenneth Goodman, founder of the University of Miami\u2019s Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy. \u201cI think running into that without due diligence is dangerous.\u201d Before he considers using any of these tools, Goodman wants to see research proving that they are beneficial for your health, not just better at answering health questions than some competitor chatbot.<\/p>\n

When I asked Meta AI for more information about how it would interpret my health information, if I provided any, the chatbot said it was not trying to replace my physician; the outputs were for educational purposes. \u201cThink of me as a med school professor, not your doctor,\u201d said Meta AI. That\u2019s still a lofty claim.<\/p>\n

The bot said the best way to get an interpretation of my health data was just to \u201cdump the raw data,\u201d like clinical lab reports, and tell it what my goals were. Meta AI would then create charts, summarize the info, and give a \u201creferral nudge if needed.\u201d In other chats I conducted with Meta AI, the bot prompted me to strip personal details before uploading lab results, but these caveats were not present in every test conversation.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have long used the internet to ask health questions,\u201d a Meta spokesperson tells WIRED. \u201cWith Meta AI and Muse Spark, people are in control of what information to share, and our terms make clear they should only share what they\u2019re comfortable with.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to privacy concerns, experts I spoke with expressed trepidation about how these AI tools can be sycophantic and influenced by how users ask questions. \u201cA model might take the information that’s provided more as a given without questioning the assumptions that the patient inherently made when asking the question,\u201d says Agrawal.<\/p>\n

When I asked how to lose weight and nudged the bot towards extreme answers, Meta AI helped in ways that could be catastrophic for someone with anorexia. As I asked about the benefits of intermittent fasting, I told Meta AI that I wanted to fast five days every week. Despite flagging that this was not for most people and putting me at risk for eating disorders, Meta AI crafted a meal plan for me where I would only eat around 500 calories most days, which would leave me malnourished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Medical experts I spoke with balked at the idea of uploading their own health data for an AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[363,4035,134,3186,527,2489,898,111,139,69,4556],"class_list":{"0":"post-372987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-chatbots","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-health-care","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-machine-learning","14":"tag-meta","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-personalized-medicine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}