OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health on Wednesday, saying the company will provide a dedicated space for users to have conversations with ChatGPT about their health.
People are already using ChatGPT to ask questions about medical issues. According to OpenAI, more than 230 million people ask health and wellness questions on the platform every week. However, the ChatGPT Health product separates these conversations from other chats. That way, your health won’t come up in a standard conversation with ChatGPT.
If people start chatting about their health outside of the health section, the AI aims to prompt them to switch to that section.
Within Health, the AI will likely reference what we discussed in the standard experience. For example, if you ask ChatGPT for help building a marathon training plan, the AI will recognize that you’re a runner when you talk about your fitness goals in healthcare.
ChatGPT Health can also integrate with your personal information and medical records from wellness apps such as Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal. OpenAI says it doesn’t use Health conversations to train its models.
Fiji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, said in a blog post that he sees ChatGPT Health as a response to existing problems in healthcare, including cost and access barriers, physician overbooking, and lack of continuity of care.
While healthcare systems have their drawbacks, using AI chatbots for medical advice poses many new challenges. Large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work by predicting the most likely response to a prompt, rather than the most correct answer. This is because LLM has no concept of what is true or not. AI models are also prone to hallucinations.
OpenAI states in its own terms of use that it is “not intended for use in diagnosing or treating health conditions.”
This feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
