Dr. Google is being kicked to the curb. Welcome to AI. Will the diagnoses be any better?

For the past two decades, there’s been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker “Dr. Google.” But times are changing, and many medical-information seekers are now using LLMs. According to OpenAI, 230 million people ask ChatGPT health-related queries each week.

That’s the context around the launch of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Health product ….

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The release of ChatGPT Health, and Anthropic’s subsequent announcement of new health integrations for Claude, indicate that the AI giants are increasingly willing to acknowledge and encourage health-related uses of their models. 

If Dr. ChatGPT is an improvement over Dr. Google—and early evidence suggests it may be—it could potentially lessen the enormous burden of medical misinformation and unnecessary health anxiety that the internet has created.

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Because ChatGPT communicates like an articulate person, some people might trust it too much, potentially to the exclusion of their doctor. But LLMs are certainly no replacement for a human doctor—at least not yet.

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