ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:37 AM UTC

lukan wrote: post #211

sarchertech wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends entirely on what the problem is. You might not get a long examination on your first visit for common complaint with no red flags. But even then just because you don’t think they are using most of their senses, doesn’t mean they aren’t.

It depends entirely on the local health care system and your health insurance. In germany for example it comes in 2 tiers. Premium or standard. Standard comes with no time for the patient. (Or not even being able to get a appointment)

I don’t know anything about German healthcare.

In the US people on Medicaid frequently use emergency rooms as primary care because they are open 24/7 and they don’t have any copays like people with private insurance do. These patients then get far more tests than they’d get at a PCP.

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

#242

Post by webnrrd2k » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:39 AM UTC

This strikes ma as a bit unnecessary, like forbidding people from using chatGPT to develop nuclear power plants.

I mean, there is a lot of professional activities that are licensed, and for good reason. Sure it's good at a lot of stuff, but ChatGPT has no professional licenses.

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

#243

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

dimitri-vs wrote: post #176

sarchertech wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, but I'm sure you can see why people prefer the infinite patience and availability of ChatGPT vs having to wait weeks to see your doctor, see them for 15 minutes only to be referred to another specialist that's available weeks away and has an arduous hour long intake process all so you can get 15 minutes of their time.

ChatGPT is effectively an unlimited resource. Whether doctor’s appointments take weeks or hours to secure, ChatGPT is always going to be more convenient.

That says nothing about whether it is an appropriate substitute. People prefer doctors who prescribe antibiotics for viral infections, so I have no doubt that many people would love to use a service that they can manipulate to give them whatever diagnosis they desire.

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

#244

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:49 AM UTC

bushbaba wrote: post #234

Huxley1 wrote: post #223

I've used ChatGPT to help understand medical records too. It's definitely faster than searching everything on my own, but whether the information is reliable still depends on personal judgment or asking a real doctor. More people are treating it like a doctor or lawyer now, and the more it's used that way, the higher the chance something goes wrong. OpenAI is clearly drawing a line here. You're free to ask questions,…

I’ve found it just as accurate and a better experience than using telehealth or generalist doctors

You can’t possibly have enough data to support that statement.

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

#245

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:56 AM UTC

sfblah wrote: post #73

Things like this really favor models offered from countries that have fewer legal restrictions. I just don't think it's realistic to expect people not to have access to these capabilities. It would be reasonable to add a disclaimer. But as things stand I think it's fair to consider talking to ChatGPT to be the same as talking to a random person on the street, meaning normal free-speech protections would apply.

>I think it's fair to consider talking to ChatGPT to be the same as talking to a random person on the street

That’s not how companies market AI though. And the models themselves tend to present their answers in a highly confident manner.

Without explicit disclaimers, a reasonable person could easily believe that ChatGPT is an authority in the law or medicine. That’s what moves the needle over to practicing the law/medicine without a license.

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

#246

Post by findthebug » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:59 AM UTC

Maybe also disallow vibe coding because then i do not need to fix all this slop code in our company :-))

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

#247

Post by yallpendantools » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:09 AM UTC

webnrrd2k wrote: post #242

This strikes ma as a bit unnecessary, like forbidding people from using chatGPT to develop nuclear power plants. I mean, there is a lot of professional activities that are licensed , and for good reason. Sure it's good at a lot of stuff, but ChatGPT has no professional licenses.

I'm glad you mentioned nuclear power plants because this whole topic reminded me of the following clause in the Java SE license:

> You will not use the Programs for, and will not allow the Programs to be used for, any purposes prohibited by applicable law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. > > https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/javase-license1.ht...

IANAL but I've come to interpret this as something along the lines of "You can't use a JDK-based language to develop nuclear weapons". I would even go as far as saying don't use JDK-based languages in anything related to nuclear energy (like, for example, administration of a nuclear power plant) because that could indirectly contribute to the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear WMD.

And I always wondered how they plan to enforce this clause. At least with ChatGPT (and I didn't look any deeper into this beyond the article) you can analyze API calls/request IPs correlated with prompts. But how will one go about proving that the Republic of Wadiya didn't build their nuclear arsenal with the help of any JDK-based language?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course. What's "unnecessary" to you and "unenforceable" to me is a cover-your-ass clause that lets lawyers sleep soundly at night.

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

#248

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

bushbaba wrote: post #234

Huxley1 wrote: post #223

I've used ChatGPT to help understand medical records too. It's definitely faster than searching everything on my own, but whether the information is reliable still depends on personal judgment or asking a real doctor. More people are treating it like a doctor or lawyer now, and the more it's used that way, the higher the chance something goes wrong. OpenAI is clearly drawing a line here. You're free to ask questions,…

I’ve found it just as accurate and a better experience than using telehealth or generalist doctors

If you're not a doctor, how do you know it's accurate?

This is the huge problem with using LLMs for this kind of thing. How do you verify that it is better? What is the ground truth you are testing it against?

If you wanted to verify that ChatGPT could do math, you'd ask it 100 math problems and then (importantly) verify its answers with a calculator. How do you verify that ChatGPT can interpret medical information without ground truth to compare it to?

People are just saying, "oh it works" based on gut vibes and not based on actually testing the results.

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

#249

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:16 AM UTC

webkmsyed wrote: post #225

That’s a fair limitation. Legal and medical advice can directly impact someone’s life or safety, so AI tools must stay within ethical and regulatory boundaries. It’s better for AI to guide people toward professional help than pretend to replace it.

Add financial advice to it, too. Really, any advice. Why the fuck are people asking a probabilistic plagiarizing machine for advice on anything? This is total insanity!

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

#250

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

catlifeonmars wrote: post #233

uslic001 wrote: post #36

As a doctor I hope it still allows me to get up to speed on latest treatments for rare diseases that I see once every 10 years. It saves me a lot of time rather than having to dig through all the new information since I last encountered a rare disease.

I assume you are reading the sources rather than relying solely on the AI summaries.

God, I hope so. I would love to have a list of doctors using ChatGPT as medical education, so I can avoid them.