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AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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I feel like this is the self driving car thing again.
How often are human doctors wrong in their diagnoses?
How often are LLM doctors wrong in their diagnoses?
I'm pretty sure the former is close to 75%, and the latter substantially less. I've heard of so many people go to doctor after doctor and not get the right diagonsis or treatment for whatever they have going on, and it takes 5+ to find the one who figures it out and gets them treated.
and if the argument is "Bbbuut the LLM was wrong once and someone DIED!"
The comparison is the human being wrong over and over and over and over to the result of countless deaths. Malpractice lawsuits must be rare compared to the amount of mistakes that are made, simply because it's difficult to get to the point where you win, and extremely costly if you fail the suit.
We already have people posting on social media for medical advice. LLMs just can't be worse than that.
You can at least sue a doctor for malpractice if they make a mistake. If you follow medical advice from a chatbot and you die, who is liable?
Large Language Models were built to rewrite emails, not provide valid medical advice
If you post on reddit asking for advice, and you die after following the advice despite there being no claims of anyone being a doctor, who does someone sue?
IMO shouldn't need disclaimers stating that absolutely everyone and everything is not a lawyer, is not a HCP, etc, etc. It's just a given.
If you google something and just blindly do what the first result says, do you have a case against them too?