Artificial intelligence shows promise for supporting physicians, but patient health questions are best left to human doctors, according to Penn State researchers.
Artificial intelligence shows promise for supporting physicians, but patient health questions are best left to human doctors, according to Penn State researchers.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots respond to everyday health-related questions from general users with nearly 76% accuracy, which raises concerns about their trustworthiness in real-world client-facing applications, according to a new study led by Penn State researchers.
The researchers wanted to understand how the average person uses AI for health-related concerns and how accurately AI responds to everyday medical queries. They found that when it comes to healthcare, especially specialized areas like neurology and dermatology, AI tools may work best in the hands of trained physicians rather than patients. The team will present their findings at the 2026 Association for Computing Machinery Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) conference in Montreal, Canada, June 25-28.
“Our work focuses explicitly on healthcare scenarios that the average internet user might ask AI, which is a perspective that prior research into large language models (LLMs) and healthcare hasn’t covered,” said study co-author Amulya Yadav, associate professor of informatics and intelligent systems in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). “We wanted to understand that if people are using LLMs like ChatGPT as a symptom health checker, like historically we’ve used Google, how accurate is the LLM in answering those queries, and how harmful could those responses be?”
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