{"id":538537,"date":"2026-04-18T23:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T23:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/538537\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T23:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T23:30:08","slug":"can-i-trust-health-advice-from-an-ai-chatbot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/538537\/","title":{"rendered":"Can I trust health advice from an AI chatbot?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers are starting to unpick the strengths and weaknesses of chatbots.<\/p>\n

The Reasoning with Machines Laboratory at the University of Oxford got a team of doctors to create detailed, realistic scenarios that ranged from mild health issues you could deal with at home; through to needing a routine GP appointment, an A&E trip, or requiring calling an ambulance.<\/p>\n

When the chatbots were given the complete picture they were 95% accurate. “They were amazing, actually, nearly perfect,” researcher Prof Adam Mahdi tells me.<\/p>\n

But it was a very different story when 1,300 people were given a scenario to have a a conversation with a chatbot about in order to get a diagnosis and advice. <\/p>\n

It was the human-AI interaction that made things unravel as the accuracy fell to 35%, external<\/a> – two thirds of the time people were getting the wrong diagnosis or care.<\/p>\n

Mahdi told me: “When people talk, they share information gradually, they leave things out and they get distracted.”<\/p>\n

One scenario described the symptoms of a stroke causing bleeding on the brain called a subarachnoid haemorrhage. This is a life-threatening emergency that requires urgent hospital treatment.<\/p>\n

But as you can see, subtle differences in how people described those symptoms to ChatGPT led to wildly different advice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers are starting to unpick the strengths and weaknesses of chatbots. The Reasoning with Machines Laboratory at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-538537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}