Warning over use in UK of unregulated AI chatbots to create social care plans
Britain’s hard-pressed carers need all the help they can get. But that should not include using unregulated AI bots, according to researchers who say the AI revolution in social care needs a hard ethical edge.
A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care.
That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study.
“If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model,” Green said. “That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else.”
She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard.
But there were also potential benefits to AI, Green added. “It could help with this administrative heavy work and allow people to revisit care plans more often. At the moment, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do that, but there are organisations working on creating apps and websites to do exactly that.”
Source: The Guardian, 10 March 2024