ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

Title: "Epic Systems (MyChart)."

E.G. Here's the set of documents uploaded by the customer. Here are my most important highlights (notice that document #68 is an official letter from last year informing the person that form 68d doesn't need to be filled in their specific situation). Here are my takeaways. Here's my recommendation. Apporve or change?

This is genuinely hilarious given what LLMs are.

Basically there needs to be an LLM that can push back.

That wasn't too buried IMHO

Something more complex, more towards clinical psychiatry rather than shoulder to cry on/complaining to friend over coffee (psychologists)? You are playing a russian roulette that model in your case won't hallucinate something harmful, while acting very confidently, more than any relevant doctor would be.

There have been cases of models suggesting suicide for example or general harmful behavior. There is no responsibility, no oversight, no expert to confirm or refute claims. Its just a faster version of reddit threads.

Medical care, at the end of the day, has nothing to do with having a license or not. Its about making the correct diagnosis, in order to administer the correct treatment. Reality does not care about who (or what) made a diagnosis, or how the antibiotic you take was prescribed. You either have the diagnosis, or you do not. The antibiotic helps, or it does not.

Doing this in practice is costly and complicated, which is why society has doctors. But the only thing that actually matters is making the correct decision. And actually, when you test LLMs (in particular o3/gpt-5 and probably gemini 2.5), they are SUPERIOR to individual doctors in terms of medical decisionmaking, at least on benchmarks. That does not mean that they are superior to an entire medical system, or a skillfull attending in a particular speciality, but it does seem imply that they are far from a bad source of medical information. Just like LLMs are good at writing boilerplate code, they are good at boilerplate medical decisions, and the fact is that there is so much medical boilerplate that this skill alone makes it superior to most human doctors. There was one study which tested LLM assisted (I think it was o3) doctors VS LLMs alone (+doctors alone) on a set of cases, and the unassisted LLM did BETTER than doctors, assisted or not.

And so all this medicolegal pearlclutching about how LLMs should not provide medical advice is entirely unfounded when you look at the actual evidence. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that you should ignore the doctor and listen to chatGPT instead.

And frankly, as a doctor, it really grinds my gears when anyone implies that medical decisions should be a protected domain to our benefit. The point of medicine is not to employ doctors. The point of medicine is to cure patients, by whatever means best serves them. If LLMs take our jobs, because they do a better job than we do, that is a good thing. It is an especially good thing if the general, widely available LLM is the one that does so, and not the expensively licensed "HippocraticGPT-certified" model. Can you imagine anything more frustrating, as a poor kid in the boonies of Bangladesh trying to understand why your mother is sick, than getting told "As a language model I cannot dispense medical advice, please consult your closest healthcare professional".

Medical success is not measured in employment, profits, or legal responsibilities. It is measured in reduced mortality. The means to achieve this is completely irrelevant.

Of course, mental health is a little bit different, and much more nebulous overall. However, from the perspective of someone on the somatic front, overregulation of LLMs is unecessary, and in fact unethical. On average, an LLM will dispense better medical advice than an average person with access to google, which is what it was competing with to begin with. It is an insult to personal liberty and to the Hippocratic oath to support that this should be taken away simply because of some medicolegal bs.

OpenAI is the leading company, if they provide an instance you can use for legal advice, with relative certification etc., it'd be better to trust them rather than another random player. They create the software, the certification and the need for it.

There's HIPAA but AI firms have ignored copyright laws, so ignoring HIPAA or making consent mandatory is not a big leap from there.

- Paying for a ticket/dvd/stream to see a Ghibli movie

- Training a model on their work without compensating them, then enabling everyone to copy their art style with ~zero effort, flooding the market and diluting the value of their work. And making money in the process.

should be rather obvious. My only hypothesis so far is that a lot of the people in here have a vested interest in not understanding the outrage, so they don't.

> If you didn't want others to read your information you shouldn't have published it on the internet. That's all they're doing at the end of the day, reading it. They're not publishing it as their own, they just used publicly available data to train a model.

There is some nuance here that you fail to notice or you pretend you don't see it :D I can't copy-paste a computer program and resell it without a license. I can't say "Oh I've just read the bits, learned from it and based on this knowledge I created my own computer program that looks exactly the same except the author name is different in the »About...« section" - clearly, some reason has to be used to differentiate reading-learning-creating from simply copying...

What if instead of copy-pasting the digital code, you print it onto a film, pass the light through the film onto ants, make the light kill the ants exposed, and the rest of the ants eventually go away, and now use the dead ants as another film to somehow convert that back to digital data. You can now argue you didn't copy, you taught ants, the ants learned, and they created a new program. But you will fool no one. AI models don't actually learn, they are a different way the data is stored. I think when court decides if a use is fair and transformative enough, it investigates how much effort was put into this transformation: there was a lot of effort put into creating the AI, but once it was created, the effort put into any single work is nearly null, just the electricity, bandwidth, storage.

Most things that are generally helpful and beneficial are not 100% helpful and beneficial 100% of the time.

I used GPT-4 as a second opinion on my medical tests and doctor's advice, and it suggested an alternate diagnosis and treatment plan that turned out to be correct. That was incredibly helpful and beneficial.

You're replying to a person who had a similar and even more helpful and beneficial experience because they're alive today.

Pedantically pointing out that a beneficial and helpful thing isn't 100% beneficial and helpful 100% of the time doesn't add anything useful to the conversation since everyone here already knows it's not 100%.

C'mon, just use the CNC. Seriously though, what kind of cuts?

Really? You think filling you pipe with sand is comparable to backfilling a trench ?

And I think this is the advice that should always be doled out when using them for anything mission critical, legal, etc.

I have very mild cerebral palsy[1], the doctors were wrong about so many things with my diagnosis back in the mid to late 70s when I was born. My mom (a retired math teacher now with an MBA back then) had to go physically to different libraries out of town and colleges to do research. In 2025, she could have done the same research with ChatGPT and surfaced outside links that’s almost impossible via a web search.

Every web search on CP is inundated with slimy lawyers.

[1] it affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. Properly conditioned, I can run a decent 10 minute mile up to a 15K before the slight unbalance bothers me and I was a part time fitness instructor when I was younger.

The doctor said I was developmentally disabled - I graduated in the top of my class (south GA so take that as you will)

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/807136/lexisnexis-ceo-sean-...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/self-diagnosing-with-a...

The researchers compared ChatGPT-4 with its earlier 3.5 version and found significant improvements, but not enough.

In one example, the chatbot confidently diagnosed a patient’s rash as a reaction to laundry detergent. In reality, it was caused by latex gloves — a key detail missed by the AI, which had been told the patient studied mortuary science and used gloves.

...

While the researchers note ChatGPT did not get any of the answers spectacularly wrong, they have some simple advice.

“When you do get a response be sure to validate that response,” said Zada.

Which should be standard advice in most situations.

Personal experience when using it OpenRouter.

That said, I prefer bigger models even if they cost more. But I do this through GitHub Copilot at a steady 10 dollars per month. I can do way more request with it than I can with 10 dollars worth of credits at OpenRouter. I don't think Copilot is making any money, on the contrary.

I can imagine a few different reasons you might have, but I don't want to guess.

The thing that gets me about AI is that people act like most doctors or most lawyers are not … shitty and your odds of running into a below average one are almost 50/50

Doctors these days are more like physicists when most of the time you need a mechanic or engineer. I’ve had plenty of encounters wher I had to insist on an MRI or on specific bloodwork to hone in on the root cause of an ailment where the doctor just chalked it up to diet and exercise

Anything can be misused, including google, but the answer isn’t to take it away from people

Legal/financial advice is so out of reach for most people, the harsh truth is that ChatGPT is better than nothing and anyone who would follow what it says blindly is bound to fuck up those decisions up in some way anyway

On the other hand, if you can leverage it same as any other tool it’s a legitimate force multiplier

The cynic in me thinks this is just being done in the interest of those professions, but that starts to feel a bit tin foil-y

This is the huge problem with using LLMs for this kind of thing. How do you verify that it is better? What is the ground truth you are testing it against?

If you wanted to verify that ChatGPT could do math, you'd ask it 100 math problems and then (importantly) verify its answers with a calculator. How do you verify that ChatGPT can interpret medical information without ground truth to compare it to?

People are just saying, "oh it works" based on gut vibes and not based on actually testing the results.

The legal profession is far more at threat with AI. AI isn’t going to replace physical interactions with patients, but it might replace your need for a human to review a contract.

> EXPORT CONTROL: You acknowledge that the Software is of United States origin, is provided subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations...(2) you will not permit the Software to be used for any purposes prohibited by law, including, any prohibited development, design, manufacture or production of missiles or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

>https://docs.broadcom.com/docs/vmware-vsphere-software-devel...

Obviously, there is one piece of advice: Even if LLMs were the best health professionals, they would only have the information that users voluntarily provide through text/speech input. This is not how real health services work. Medical science now relies on blood/(whatever) tests that LLMs do not (yet) have access to. Therefore, the output from LLM advice can be incorrect due to a lack of information from tests. For this reason, it makes sense to never trust LLM with a specific health advice.

One of the things I respected OpenAI for at the release of ChatGPT was not trying to prevent these topics. My employer at the time had a cutting-edge internal LLM chatbot for a which was post-trained to avoid them, something I think they were forced to be braver about in their public release because of the competitive landscape.

I am not a doctor, I can't give medical advice no matter what my sources are, except maybe if I am just relaying the information an actual doctor has given me, but that would fall under the "appropriate involvement" part.

Both of these, separately and taken together, indicate that the terms apply to how the output of ChatGPT is used, not a change to its output altogether.

Am I allowed to get haircutting advice (in places where there's a license for that)? How about driving directions? Taxi drivers require licensing. Pet grooming?

This is from Karan Singhal, Health AI team lead at OpenAI.

Quote: “Despite speculation, this is not a new change to our terms. Model behavior remains unchanged. ChatGPT has never been a substitute for professional advice, but it will continue to be a great resource to help people understand legal and health information.”

'An earlier version of this story suggested OpenAI had ended medical and legal advice. However the company said "the model behaviour has also not changed.'

LLMs hallucinate because training on source material is a lossy process and bigger, heavier LLM-integrated systems that can research and cite primary sources are slow and expensive so few people use those techniques by default. Lowest time to a good enough response is the primary metric.

Journalists oversimplify and fail to ask followup questions because while they can research and cite primary sources, its slow and expensive in an infinitesimally short news cycle so nobody does that by default. Whoever publishes something that someone will click on first gets the ad impressions so thats the primary metric.

In either case, we've got pretty decent tools and techniques for better accuracy and education - whether via humans or LLMs and co - but most people, most of the time don't value them.

It's trivial to get a thorough spectrum of reliable sources using AI w/ web search tooling, and over the course of a principled conversation, you can find out exactly what you want to know.

It's really not bashing, this article isn't too bad, but the bulk of this site's coverage of AI topics skews negative - as do the many, many platforms and outlets owned by Bell Media, with a negative skew on AI in general, and positive reinforcement of regulatory capture related topics. Which only makes sense - they're making money, and want to continue making money, and AI threatens that - they can no longer claim they provide value if they're not providing direct, relevant, novel content, and not zergnet clickbait journo-slop.

Just like Carlin said, there doesn't have to be a conspiracy with a bunch of villains in a smoky room plotting evil, there's just a bunch of people in a club who know what's good for them, and legacy media outlets are all therefore universally incentivized to make AI look as bad and flawed and useless as possible, right up until they get what they consider to be their "fair share", as middlemen.

At least with the LLM (for now) I know it's not trying to sell me bunkum or convince me to vote a particular way. Mostly.

I do expect this state of affairs to last at least until next wednesday.

The first ER doc thought it was just a stomach ache, the second thought a stomach ache or maybe appendicitis. Did some ultrasounds, meds, etc. Got sent home with a pat on the head, came back a few hours later, still no answers.

I gave her medical history and all of the data from the ER visits to whatever the current version of ChatGPT was at the time to make sure I wasn’t failing to ask any important questions. I’m not an AI True Believer (tm), but it was clear that the doctors were missing something and I had hit the limit of my Googling abilities.

ChatGPT suggested, among an few other diagnoses, a rare intestinal birth defect that affects about 2% of the population; 2% of affected people become symptomatic during their lifetimes. I kind of filed it away and looked more into the other stuff.

They decided it might be appendicitis and went to operate. When the surgeon called to tell me that it was in fact this very rare condition, she was pretty surprised when I said I’d heard of it.

So, not a one-shot, and not a novel discovery or anything, but an anecdote where I couldn’t have subconsciously guided it to the answer as I didn’t know the answer myself.

I had a long ongoing discussion about possible alternate career paths with ChatGPT in several threads. At that point it was well aware of my education and skills, had helped clean up resumes, knew my goals, experience and all that.

So I said maybe I'll look at doing X. "Now you are thinking clearly! This is a really good fit for your skill set! If you want I can provide a checklist.". I'm just tossing around ideas but look, GPT says I can do this and it's a good fit!

After 3 idea pivots I started getting a little suspicious. So I try to think of the thing I am least qualified to do in the world and came up with "Design Women's Dresses". I wrote up all the reasons that might be a good pivot (i.e. Past experience with landscape design and it's the same idea, you reveal certain elements seductively but not all at once, matching color palettes, textures etc). Of course GPT says "Now you are really thinking clearly! You could 100% do this! If you want I can start making a list of what you will need to produce you first custom dresses". It was funny but also a bit alarming.

These tools are great. Don't take them too seriously, you can make them say a lot of things with great conviction. It's mostly just you talking to yourself in my opinion.

  >checking my now diagnosed gastritis I got stuff from GERD to CRC depending on which symptoms I decide to stress and which events I emphasize in the history

1. I described the symptoms the same way we described it to the ER the first time we brought it in. It suggested all the same things that the ER tested for. 2. I gave it the lab results for each of the suggestions it made (since the ER had in fact done all the tests they suggested).

After that back and forth it gave back a list of 3-4 more possibilities and the 2nd item was the exact issue that was revealed by radiology (and corrected with surgery).

This goes both ways, too. It’s becoming common to see cases where people become convinced they have a condition but doctors and/or tests disagree. They can become progressively better and better at getting ChatGPT to return the diagnosis by refining their prompts and learning what to tell it as well as what to leave out.

Previously we joked about WebMD convincing people they had conditions they did not, but ChatGPT is far more powerful for these people.

I don't agree with the idea that "we need rules to make people use the worse option" — contrary to prevailing political opinion, I believe people should be free to make their own mistakes — but I wouldn't necessarily rush to advocate that everyone start using current-gen AI for important research either. It's easy to imagine that an average user might lead the AI toward a preconceived false conclusion or latch onto one particular low-probability possibility presented by the AI, badger it into affirming a specific answer while grinding down its context window, and then accept that answer uncritically while unknowingly neglecting or exacerbating a serious medical or legal issue.

It should empower and enable informed decisions not make them.

I use it. Found it to be helpful.

Edit: Not saying this is the case for the person above, but one thing that might bias these observations is ChatGPT’s memory features.

If you have a chat about the condition after it’s diagnosed, you can’t use the same ChatGPT account to test whether it could have diagnosed the same thing (since the chatGPT account now knows the son has a specific condition).

The memory features are awesome but also sucks at the same time. I feel myself getting stuck in a personalized bubble even more so than Google.

In all seriousness, it’s really about the relative lack of research skills that people have. If you know how to do research and apply critical thinking, then there’s no problem. The cynic in me blames the education system (in the US, idk how other countries stack up).