ChatGPT gives better answers to health-related questions than human physicians, study finds

A recent study explored the performance of ChatGPT in generating responses to health-related questions posted on Reddit’s r/AskDocs forum. Licensed healthcare professionals compared these responses to those provided by human physicians. In 79% of cases, they found ChatGPT’s answers to be superior. The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Recent years have seen a lightning fast advance in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The use of AI is spreading very fast in all segments of the society and the economy, transforming the way things are done rapidly. The development and public availability of large language models, AI systems capable of communicating in natural human language, has opened many new areas to AI systems.

One of the most important developments in this regard is ChatGPT, a large language model launched in 2022 that reached 100 million users in just 64 days. ChatGPT is able to produce meaningful human language responses to questions addressed to it, a feature incredibly useful in many fields of work.

Study author John W. Ayers and his colleagues note that one field where good AI systems could be really helpful is healthcare, where AI could help in responding to questions of patients. The volume of messages to healthcare workers sent by patients has been drastically increasing in recent years contributing to burnout in physicians.

With this in mind, and noting that ChatGPT was not created to provide healthcare advice, they conducted a study that aimed to explore the quality of answers ChatGPT gives to typical questions patients ask healthcare workers. Study authors note that although there were no previous published studies examining the quality of answers ChatGPT gives, some physicians were still integrating ChatGPT into their systems for responding to patients’ questions.

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The researchers drew a random sample of 195 exchanges between physicians and patients from the Reddit’s online forum r/AskDocs, a subreddit with approximately 474,000 members, where users can post medical questions and verified health care professional volunteers submit answers. They took care not to repeat questions and answers from the same physician and the same patient.

Although different types of healthcare professionals respond in this forum, this study solely focused on answers given by physicians. This was because the study authors expected the responses of physicians to be of better quality than answers given by other types of healthcare professionals. If a physician provided multiple responses, only the first was included in the analysis.

ChatGPT was tasked with generating answers to the same questions. The original question, the physician’s response, and ChatGPT’s response were presented to a team of three evaluators, who were blinded to the source of each response. The evaluators assessed which response was better, rated the quality of the information, and evaluated the empathy or bedside manner displayed.

The two responses were presented to evaluators in a random order (i.e., they could not tell whether the response was AI or human generated based on whether it was the first or the second response shown to them) and the study authors removed any obviously revealing information from the answer (e.g. ChatGPT stating that it is an artificial intelligence in an answer). The evaluators were licensed health care professionals working in pediatrics, geriatrics, internal medicine, oncology, infectious disease, and preventive medicine.

In 79% of cases, evaluators stated that responses given by ChatGPT are better. They also rated them to be of higher quality than answers given by physicians. The mean rating they gave to ChatGPT’s responses was good, while the average rating given to physicians’ answers was only acceptable (“acceptable” is worse than “good”).

Moreover, evaluators rated 27% of physicians’ answers as being of less than acceptable quality. This was the case with only 3% of answers given by ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s responses were also rated as more empathetic. On average, ChatGPT’s responses were rated as empathetic, while those of physicians were rated as slightly empathetic.

“While this cross-sectional study has demonstrated promising results in the use of AI assistants for patient questions, it is crucial to note that further research is necessary before any definitive conclusions can be made regarding their potential effect in clinical settings. Despite the limitations of this study and the frequent overhyping of new technologies, studying the addition of AI assistants to patient messaging workflows holds promise with the potential to improve both clinician and patient outcomes,” the study authors concluded.

The study provides valuable insight into the quality of health-related advice given by ChatGPT. However, it should be noted that the study compared ChatGPT’s responses, to volunteered responses of physicians on a free online forum. This raises the question of the amount of effort physicians invested in their responses. The results would likely be different in situations when physicians invested full effort in providing good responses.

The paper “Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum” was authored by John W. Ayers, Adam Poliak, Mark Dredze, Eric C. Leas, Zechariah Zhu, Jessica B. Kelley, Dennis J. Faix, Aaron M. Goodman, Christopher A. Longhurst, Michael Hogarth, and Davey M. Smith.