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ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

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Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#161

That anyone would use any LLM for medical advice is beyond me. It’s webMD with slicker ui. Obviously they should disallow them and more broadly should be banned from providing anyone medical Advice

What’s wrong with WebMD? I’ve gotten a lot of value when it comes to questions about diet, supplements, exercise, even getting advice on incidents like my dog getting a porcupine quill in his paw. It’s a lot better than Googling for ancient forum threads.

if you're a hypochondriac, on WebMD, all roads lead to cancer.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While they aren't stopping users from getting medical advice, the new terms (which they say are pretty much the same as the old terms), seem to prohibit users from seeking medical advice even for themselves if that advice would otherwise come from a licensed health professional: https://openai.com/en-GB/policies/usage-policies/ Your use of OpenAI services must follow these Usage Policies: Protect people. Everyone has…

It sounds like you should never trust any medical advice you receive from ChatGPT and should seek proper medical help instead. That makes sense. The OpenAI company doesn't want to be held responsible for any medical advice that goes wrong. Obviously, there is one piece of advice: Even if LLMs were the best health professionals, they would only have the information that users voluntarily provide through text/speech in…

And it’s not just lab tests and bloodwork. Physicians use all their senses. They poke, they prod, they manipulate, they look, listen, and smell.

They’re also good at extracting information in a way that (at least currently) sycophantic LLMs don’t replicate.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#163

This title is inaccurate. What they are disallowing are users using ChatGPT to offer legal and medical advice to other people. First parties can still use ChatGPT for medical and legal advice for themselves.

It’s a big issue. I went to an urgent care, and the provider basically went off somewhere and memorized the ChatGPT assessment for my symptoms. Like word for word.

All you need are a few patients recording their visits and connecting the dots and OpenAI gets sued into oblivion.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#164
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is written to be tounge-in-cheek, but its really almost the exact same problem playing out on both sides. LLMs hallucinate because training on source material is a lossy process and bigger, heavier LLM-integrated systems that can research and cite primary sources are slow and expensive so few people use those techniques by default. Lowest time to a good enough response is the primary metric. Journalists o…

Classical LLM hallucination happens because AI doesn’t have a world model. It can’t compare what it’s saying to anything. You’re right that LLMs favor helpfulness so they may just make things up when they don’t know them, but this alone doesn’t capture the crux of hallucination imo, it’s deeper than just being overconfident. OTOH, there was an interesting article recently that I’ll try to find saying humans don’t rea…

You're right, "journalists don't have a world model and can't compare what they're saying to anything" explains a lot.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#165
post #3

Tricky…my son had a really rare congenital issue that no one could solve for a long time. After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth. I’m not saying we should be getting AI advice without a professional, but I’m my case it could have saved my kid a LOT of physical…

Why are you saying we shouldn't get AI advice without a "professional", then? Why is everybody here saying "in my experience it's just as good or better, but we need rules to make people use the worse option"? I have narcolepsy and it took a dozen doctors before they got it right. AI nails the diagnosis. Everybody should be using it.

Aside from AI skepticism, I think a lot of it likely comes from low expectations of what the broader population would get out of it. Writing, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and LLM-fu may be skills that come naturally to many of us, but at the same time many others who "do their own research" also fall into rabbit holes and arrive at wacky conclusions like flat-Eartherism.

I don't agree with the idea that "we need rules to make people use the worse option" — contrary to prevailing political opinion, I believe people should be free to make their own mistakes — but I wouldn't necessarily rush to advocate that everyone start using current-gen AI for important research either. It's easy to imagine that an average user might lead the AI toward a preconceived false conclusion or latch onto one particular low-probability possibility presented by the AI, badger it into affirming a specific answer while grinding down its context window, and then accept that answer uncritically while unknowingly neglecting or exacerbating a serious medical or legal issue.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#166
post #3

Tricky…my son had a really rare congenital issue that no one could solve for a long time. After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth. I’m not saying we should be getting AI advice without a professional, but I’m my case it could have saved my kid a LOT of physical…

>After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth. Something I've noticed is that it's much easier to lead the LLM to the answer when you know where you want to go (even when the answer is factually wrong !), it doesn't have to be obvious leading but just framing the qu…

Indeed is is very easy to lead the LLM to the answer, often without realizing you are doing so.

I had a long ongoing discussion about possible alternate career paths with ChatGPT in several threads. At that point it was well aware of my education and skills, had helped clean up resumes, knew my goals, experience and all that.

So I said maybe I'll look at doing X. "Now you are thinking clearly! This is a really good fit for your skill set! If you want I can provide a checklist.". I'm just tossing around ideas but look, GPT says I can do this and it's a good fit!

After 3 idea pivots I started getting a little suspicious. So I try to think of the thing I am least qualified to do in the world and came up with "Design Women's Dresses". I wrote up all the reasons that might be a good pivot (i.e. Past experience with landscape design and it's the same idea, you reveal certain elements seductively but not all at once, matching color palettes, textures etc). Of course GPT says "Now you are really thinking clearly! You could 100% do this! If you want I can start making a list of what you will need to produce you first custom dresses". It was funny but also a bit alarming.

These tools are great. Don't take them too seriously, you can make them say a lot of things with great conviction. It's mostly just you talking to yourself in my opinion.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While they aren't stopping users from getting medical advice, the new terms (which they say are pretty much the same as the old terms), seem to prohibit users from seeking medical advice even for themselves if that advice would otherwise come from a licensed health professional: https://openai.com/en-GB/policies/usage-policies/ Your use of OpenAI services must follow these Usage Policies: Protect people. Everyone has…

It sounds like you should never trust any medical advice you receive from ChatGPT and should seek proper medical help instead. That makes sense. The OpenAI company doesn't want to be held responsible for any medical advice that goes wrong. Obviously, there is one piece of advice: Even if LLMs were the best health professionals, they would only have the information that users voluntarily provide through text/speech in…

So ask it what blood tests you should get, pay for them out of pocket, and upload the PDF of your labwork?

Like it or not there are people out there that really want to use webMD 2.0. they're not going to let something silly like blood work get in their way.

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#169
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Parent has edited out the comment ranting about "the normal people using chatGPT as a modern WebMD". This is not shutting anything down other than businesses using ChatGPT to give medical advice [0]. Users can still ask questions, get answers, but the terms have been made clearer around reuse of that response (you cannot claim that it is medical advice). I imagine that a startup that specialises in "medical adv…

The thing is that if you are giving professional advice in US - legal, financial, medical - the other party can sue you for wrong or misleading advice. In that scenario, this leaves Openai exposed to a lawsuit, and this change seemingly eliminates that.

Would be amazing if they prefix everything with “this is not financial advice. Do your own research. “

Re: ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

#170

This title is inaccurate. What they are disallowing are users using ChatGPT to offer legal and medical advice to other people. First parties can still use ChatGPT for medical and legal advice for themselves.

Isn’t that exactly what the title says?
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