More than 230m people globally ask health and wellness-related questions on ChatGPT every week, OpenAI said.
OpenAI is releasing ChatGPT Health, a dedicated service within the AI chatbot for health-related queries.
The new service is marketed as the secure and a ‘one stop shop’ way of asking ChatGPT personal health questions.
Users can connect their medical records and wellness apps such as Apple Health and MyFitnessPal to ChatGPT, allowing the bot access to analyse the data and output informed responses, said OpenAI. This can include understanding test results, preparing for appointments, and advice on diet and workouts.
According to OpenAI, more than 230m people globally ask health and wellness-related questions on ChatGPT every week. However, these are not entirely private.
Speaking in a podcast last year, CEO Sam Altman said that ChatGPT does not offer doctor-patient confidentiality the same way a trained human professional would. “People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT.”
This, he said, could lead to privacy concerns. Plus, if left to its default settings, ChatGPT also takes user inputs and content to train its models.
‘Health’ tries to mitigate these issues. Conversations from the service are not used to train OpenAI’s foundation models, the company said. And although ChatGPT might take data from non-Health chats, OpenAI claims that data shared to Health will not flow back out the other way.
With hundreds of millions using the bots, information shared to ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and the like are not just valuable to the companies providing the services. A security firm recently uncovered a VPN service which captured conversations users were having on AI platforms, selling it for marketing reasons.
OpenAI has worked for more than two years, with a few hundred physicians across the world to develop the service, it said. The chatbot has been evaluated against clinical standards set by an assessment framework OpenAI has created specifically for examining health-related outputs.
Interested users outside the EEA, Switzerland and the UK can sign up for the waitlist to join ChatGPT Health, which will run with a small cohort of users to refine the experience. The company plans to expand access and make the service available to users across the web and iOS in the coming weeks, it said.
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