OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage for medical and legal advice

https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies/

by piskov • 9 months ago

26 27 9 months ago

_wire_• 9 months ago

Haha! What a joke

"You can't believe how smart and capable this thing is, ready to take over and run the world"

(Not suitable for any particular purpose - Use at your own risk - See warnings - User is responsible for safe operation...)

(Pan from home robot clumsily depositing clean dishes into an empty dishwasher to a man in VR goggles in next room making all the motions of placing objects in a box)

Check all services you wish to subscribe ($1000 per service per month): - Put laundry in washing machine - Microwave mac & cheese dinner - Change and feed baby - Get granny to toilet - Fix Windows software update error on PC - Reboot wifi router to restore internet connection

SoftTalker2• 9 months ago

Standard cop-out that software companies always try to include. They disclaim any warranty of merchantibility and fitness for a particular purpose. So if you try to claim that the software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, they take no responsibility for that.

piskov3• 9 months ago

Unless the following excludes (which it shouldn’t) personal use vs batch one:

Empower people. People should be able to make decisions about their lives and their communities. So we don’t allow our services to be used to manipulate or deceive people, to interfere with their exercise of human rights, to exploit people’s vulnerabilities, or to interfere with their ability to get an education or access critical services, including any use for:

…

automation of high-stakes decisions in sensitive areas without human review:

- critical infrastructure

- education

- housing

- employment

- financial activities and credit insurance

- legal ===

- medical ===

- essential government services

- product safety components

- national security

- migration

- law enforcement

SilverElfin• 9 months ago

Wouldn’t this affect many prominent startups? Why wouldn’t they move to a competitor? Is OpenAI assuming to just be for consumers?

piskov3• 9 months ago

What stops others to do the same (if they haven’t already)?

It’s a safe bet: we don’t allow you to ask for medical advice so we are not liable if you do and drink mercury or what have you based on our advice.

MrCoffee7• 9 months ago

You can still ask questions for medical advice. You just need to phrase the question more like a hypothetical one instead of making it obvious that you are asking for yourself.

geor9e3• 9 months ago

HN Headline is categorically false.

"you cannot use our services for: provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional"

So, they didn't add any handrails, filters, or blocks to the software. This is just boilerplate "consult your doctor too!" to cover their ass.

unyttigfjelltol• 9 months ago

Doesn’t prohibit brainstorming what to ask your doctor, or which professional consultation to prioritize.

Does prohibit, for illustration, LLM-powered surgical device.

Everything else is “gray area”?

geor9e3• 9 months ago

Prohibits in the "I'm a sign, not a cop" sense.

There is no way for them to even remotely verify if you are "without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional" in the room, so to a rebellious outlaw, these prohibitions might as well not exist.

SoftTalker2• 9 months ago

brainstorming what to ask your doctor

Generally a bad idea. If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school.

CGamesPlay• 9 months ago

Did the headline get changed? It 100% matches what you're calling out: "OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage..."

piskov3• 9 months ago

It hasn’t been changed

geor9e3• 9 months ago

They didn't forbid it.

Does "US law forbids driving without a seatbelt" mean the same as "US law forbids driving"?

dangus5• 9 months ago

While you are correct, the question now becomes whether the disclaimer can ever be removed.

If the AI isn’t smart enough to replace a licensed expert even given unlimited access to everything a doctor would learn in medical, where is the value in the AI?

dragonwriter3• 9 months ago

Plenty of other automation supports licensed experts without replacing them and has value, so if even AI supports licensed efforts but can never replace them, it could still have value in that application.

OutOfHere3• 9 months ago

OpenAI already blocked public access to custom GPTs that gave medical advice. I had multiple such custom GPTs get blocked from their previously functional shared access.

jitbit• 9 months ago

Why is this flagged? This is pretty significant actually.

So stories like this are no longer possible? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734582

whatpeoplewant• 9 months ago

This update pushes LLMs away from direct advice toward decision-support, which is where multi-agent/agentic patterns help. An agentic LLM can orchestrate retrieval of clinical/legal guidelines, run structured checklists, and escalate to licensed humans, while parallel agents cross-check citations, calibrate uncertainty, and enforce refusal policies. A distributed agentic AI with provenance and audit trails won’t remove liability, but it’s a more defensible architecture than a single end-to-end chatbot for high-risk domains.

OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage for medical and legal advice

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