Artificial Intelligence Chatbots and Seeking Health Information: Opportunity or Threat?

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has become one of the key tools in many fields. One of the special tools in the field of AI is AI chatbots, which have benefited from advances in deep learning, natural language processing, transformers, and large language models (LLM)[1]. These chatbots based on LLMs are designed to mimic interactive conversations, whereby the user enters a potentially complex request, and the chatbot provides a human-like response. Since their inception, these chatbots have been utilized for various applications, including answering questions, creating explanations and summaries, translating between languages, and various other tasks involving natural languages [2]. The first models recognized and accepted in this regard were ChatGPT, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models developed by OpenAI, followed by other LLM-based chatbots such as Google Bard and Meta LLaMA.
One of the significant uses of these chatbots is to facilitate access to health information. These chatbots can automatically answer users' questions and provide appropriate medical information based on their needs [3]. Preliminary evaluations have shown that large language models have strong semantic and syntactic understanding in many natural languages and can perform natural language processing tasks in response to health-related questions effectively [4]. However, the fundamental question is whether this technology is a valuable opportunity to improve access to health information or a threat that could pose potential problems.