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+--- Thread: Research AI chatbots can run crazy with medical misinformation; need for safeguards (/thread-18519.html)
AI chatbots can run crazy with medical misinformation; need for safeguards - C C - Aug 6, 2025
AI chatbots can run with medical misinformation, study finds, highlighting the need for stronger safeguards
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1093731
INTRO: A new study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai finds that widely used AI chatbots are highly vulnerable to repeating and elaborating on false medical information, revealing a critical need for stronger safeguards before these tools can be trusted in health care.
The researchers also demonstrated that a simple built-in warning prompt can meaningfully reduce that risk, offering a practical path forward as the technology rapidly evolves. Their findings were detailed in the August 2 online issue of Communications Medicine.
As more doctors and patients turn to AI for support, the investigators wanted to understand whether chatbots would blindly repeat incorrect medical details embedded in a user’s question, and whether a brief prompt could help steer them toward safer, more accurate responses.
“What we saw across the board is that AI chatbots can be easily misled by false medical details, whether those errors are intentional or accidental,” says lead author Mahmud Omar, MD, who is an independent consultant with the research team. “They not only repeated the misinformation but often expanded on it, offering confident explanations for non-existent conditions. The encouraging part is that a simple, one-line warning added to the prompt cut those hallucinations dramatically, showing that small safeguards can make a big difference.”
The team created fictional patient scenarios, each containing one fabricated medical term such as a made-up disease, symptom, or test, and submitted them to leading large language models. In the first round, the chatbots reviewed the scenarios with no extra guidance provided. In the second round, the researchers added a one-line caution to the prompt, reminding the AI that the information provided might be inaccurate.
Without that warning, the chatbots routinely elaborated on the fake medical detail, confidently generating explanations about conditions or treatments that do not exist. But with the added prompt, those errors were reduced significantly... (MORE - details, no ads)
RE: AI chatbots can run crazy with medical misinformation; need for safeguards - confused2 - Aug 7, 2025
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