Experts have issued a stark warning about the use of AI chatbots for health and medical information.
Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Grok frequently "hallucinate," delivering inaccurate and incomplete medical information, research has found.
Half of the responses to 50 medical questions in a recent study were deemed "problematic."
All AI types were implicated, with Grok showing the most issues (58%), followed by ChatGPT (52%) and Meta AI (50%).
Researchers said “chatbots often hallucinate, generating incorrect or misleading responses due to biased or incomplete training data, and models that are fine-tuned on human feedback are known to exhibit sycophancy – prioritising answers that align with user beliefs over the truth”.
They said the incorporation of AI chatbots into medicine requires diligent oversight, “especially since they are not licensed to dispense medical advice and may not have access to up-to-date medical knowledge”.
Previous work has found that only 32% of more than 500 citations from ChatGPT, ScholarGPT and DeepSeek were accurate and almost half were at least partially fabricated, according to the study.
Source: The Independent, 15 April 2026
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