Online forums for difficult medical conditions are full of ChatGPT copy-and-paste responses right now. LLMs are the tool of choice for people who want answers and want them now. Much like this article claims, a popular usage is to prompt the LLM to get a more optimistic interpretation about a specific supplement or treatment.
This is a really difficult problem because these people are often very sick and not getting the answers they want from their doctors. Previously this void was filled by alternative medicine doctors and quacks selling supplements. Now ChatGPT has arrived and has convinced a lot of them that they have a super-human AI at their fingertips that can be massaged to produce any answer they want to hear.
It’s painful to try to read some of these forums where threads have turned into endless “here’s what ChatGPT says” pasted walls of text, followed by someone else trying to counter with a different ChatGPT wall of text.
This isn’t unique to LLMs. There is a huge market for grossly exaggerating the conclusions of scientific studies. Podcasters like Huberman and Dr. Rhonda Patrick are famous for taking obscure studies with questionable conclusions and extrapolating to “protocols” or supplement stacks for their fans to follow. I often get downvoted when I mention fan-favorite podcasters by name, but I think by now many listeners have caught on to the way they exaggerate small studies into exciting listening material.
This is a really difficult problem because these people are often very sick and not getting the answers they want from their doctors. Previously this void was filled by alternative medicine doctors and quacks selling supplements. Now ChatGPT has arrived and has convinced a lot of them that they have a super-human AI at their fingertips that can be massaged to produce any answer they want to hear.
It’s painful to try to read some of these forums where threads have turned into endless “here’s what ChatGPT says” pasted walls of text, followed by someone else trying to counter with a different ChatGPT wall of text.
This isn’t unique to LLMs. There is a huge market for grossly exaggerating the conclusions of scientific studies. Podcasters like Huberman and Dr. Rhonda Patrick are famous for taking obscure studies with questionable conclusions and extrapolating to “protocols” or supplement stacks for their fans to follow. I often get downvoted when I mention fan-favorite podcasters by name, but I think by now many listeners have caught on to the way they exaggerate small studies into exciting listening material.