ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/openai-updates-policies-so-chatgpt-wont-provide-medical-or-legal-advice/

by randycupertino • 9 months ago

379 425 9 months ago

Sounds like it is still giving out medical and legal information just adding CYA disclaimers.

mikkupikku• 9 months ago

It would be terribly boring if it didn't. Just last night I had it walk me through reptile laws in my state to evaluate my business plan for a vertically integrated snapping turtle farm and turtle soup restaurant empire. Absurd, but it's fun to use for this kind of thing because it almost always takes you seriously.

(Turns out I would need permits :-( )

cpfohl6• 9 months ago

Tricky…my son had a really rare congenital issue that no one could solve for a long time. After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth.

I’m not saying we should be getting AI advice without a professional, but I’m my case it could have saved my kid a LOT of physical pain.

throwaway2904• 9 months ago

this is fresh news right? a friend just used chatgpt for medical advice last week (stuffed his wound with antibiotics after motorbike crash). are you saying you completely treated the congenital issue in this timeframe?

cj2• 9 months ago

He’s simply saying that ChatGPT was able to point them in the right direction after 1 chat exchange, compared to doctors who couldn’t for a long time.

Edit: Not saying this is the case for the person above, but one thing that might bias these observations is ChatGPT’s memory features.

If you have a chat about the condition after it’s diagnosed, you can’t use the same ChatGPT account to test whether it could have diagnosed the same thing (since the chatGPT account now knows the son has a specific condition).

The memory features are awesome but also sucks at the same time. I feel myself getting stuck in a personalized bubble even more so than Google.

tencentshill• 9 months ago

We are all obligated to hoard as many offline AI models as possible if the larger ones are legally restricted like this.

SlavikCA• 9 months ago

Google released MedGemma model: "optimized for medical text and image comprehension".

I use it. Found it to be helpful.

rafaelmn• 9 months ago

After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth.

Something I've noticed is that it's much easier to lead the LLM to the answer when you know where you want to go (even when the answer is factually wrong !), it doesn't have to be obvious leading but just framing the question in terms of mentioning all the symptoms you now know to be relevant in the order that's diagnosable, etc.

Not saying that's the case here, you might have gotten the correct answer first try - but checking my now diagnosed gastritis I got stuff from GERD to CRC depending on which symptoms I decide to stress and which events I emphasize in the history.

schiffern• 9 months ago

  >checking my now diagnosed gastritis I got stuff from GERD to CRC depending on which symptoms I decide to stress and which events I emphasize in the history

So... exactly the same behavior as human doctors?

el_benhameen2• 9 months ago

In January my daughter had a pretty scary stomach issue that had us in the ER twice in 24 hours and that ended in surgery (just fine now).

The first ER doc thought it was just a stomach ache, the second thought a stomach ache or maybe appendicitis. Did some ultrasounds, meds, etc. Got sent home with a pat on the head, came back a few hours later, still no answers.

I gave her medical history and all of the data from the ER visits to whatever the current version of ChatGPT was at the time to make sure I wasn’t failing to ask any important questions. I’m not an AI True Believer (tm), but it was clear that the doctors were missing something and I had hit the limit of my Googling abilities.

ChatGPT suggested, among an few other diagnoses, a rare intestinal birth defect that affects about 2% of the population; 2% of affected people become symptomatic during their lifetimes. I kind of filed it away and looked more into the other stuff.

They decided it might be appendicitis and went to operate. When the surgeon called to tell me that it was in fact this very rare condition, she was pretty surprised when I said I’d heard of it.

So, not a one-shot, and not a novel discovery or anything, but an anecdote where I couldn’t have subconsciously guided it to the answer as I didn’t know the answer myself.

mythrwy• 9 months ago

Indeed is is very easy to lead the LLM to the answer, often without realizing you are doing so.

I had a long ongoing discussion about possible alternate career paths with ChatGPT in several threads. At that point it was well aware of my education and skills, had helped clean up resumes, knew my goals, experience and all that.

So I said maybe I'll look at doing X. "Now you are thinking clearly! This is a really good fit for your skill set! If you want I can provide a checklist.". I'm just tossing around ideas but look, GPT says I can do this and it's a good fit!

After 3 idea pivots I started getting a little suspicious. So I try to think of the thing I am least qualified to do in the world and came up with "Design Women's Dresses". I wrote up all the reasons that might be a good pivot (i.e. Past experience with landscape design and it's the same idea, you reveal certain elements seductively but not all at once, matching color palettes, textures etc). Of course GPT says "Now you are really thinking clearly! You could 100% do this! If you want I can start making a list of what you will need to produce you first custom dresses". It was funny but also a bit alarming.

These tools are great. Don't take them too seriously, you can make them say a lot of things with great conviction. It's mostly just you talking to yourself in my opinion.

Aurornis• 9 months ago

Something I've noticed is that it's much easier to lead the LLM to the answer when you know where you want to go

This goes both ways, too. It’s becoming common to see cases where people become convinced they have a condition but doctors and/or tests disagree. They can become progressively better and better at getting ChatGPT to return the diagnosis by refining their prompts and learning what to tell it as well as what to leave out.

Previously we joked about WebMD convincing people they had conditions they did not, but ChatGPT is far more powerful for these people.

cpfohl6• 9 months ago

Yeah, my son's issue was rare and congenital. I wish I still had the conversation, but I can't remember which LLM it was and it's not in either my Claude or GPT history. It got it in two shots.

1. I described the symptoms the same way we described it to the ER the first time we brought it in. It suggested all the same things that the ER tested for. 2. I gave it the lab results for each of the suggestions it made (since the ER had in fact done all the tests they suggested).

After that back and forth it gave back a list of 3-4 more possibilities and the 2nd item was the exact issue that was revealed by radiology (and corrected with surgery).

terminalshort4• 9 months ago

Why are you saying we shouldn't get AI advice without a "professional", then? Why is everybody here saying "in my experience it's just as good or better, but we need rules to make people use the worse option"? I have narcolepsy and it took a dozen doctors before they got it right. AI nails the diagnosis. Everybody should be using it.

pinnochio3• 9 months ago

Survivorship bias.

ares6234• 9 months ago

How do you hold the AI accountable when it makes a mistake? Can you take away its license "individually"?

RobertDeNiro• 9 months ago

I wonder if the reason AI is better at these diagnostics, is because the amount of time it spends with the patient is unbounded. Whereas a doctor is always restricted by the amount of time they have with the patient.

buu700• 9 months ago

Aside from AI skepticism, I think a lot of it likely comes from low expectations of what the broader population would get out of it. Writing, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and LLM-fu may be skills that come naturally to many of us, but at the same time many others who "do their own research" also fall into rabbit holes and arrive at wacky conclusions like flat-Eartherism.

I don't agree with the idea that "we need rules to make people use the worse option" — contrary to prevailing political opinion, I believe people should be free to make their own mistakes — but I wouldn't necessarily rush to advocate that everyone start using current-gen AI for important research either. It's easy to imagine that an average user might lead the AI toward a preconceived false conclusion or latch onto one particular low-probability possibility presented by the AI, badger it into affirming a specific answer while grinding down its context window, and then accept that answer uncritically while unknowingly neglecting or exacerbating a serious medical or legal issue.

cpfohl6• 9 months ago

I’m saying that is a great tool for people who can see through the idiotic nonsense they so often make up. A professional _has_ the context to see through it.

It should empower and enable informed decisions not make them.

tamimio2• 9 months ago

That's the experience of a lot of people I know or read their stories online, but it isn't about AI bad diagnosis, it's because they know in 5 years doctors and lawyers will be burger flippers, and as a result people won't be motivated to go into any of these fields. In Canada, the process to be a doctor is extremely complicated and hard only to keep it as some sort of private community that only the very few can become doctors, all to keep the wages abysmally high, and as a result, you end up waiting long times for appointments, and the doctors themselves are overwhelmed too. Messed up system that you better pray you never have to become its victim.

In my opinion, AI should do both legal and medical work, keep some humans for decision making, and the rest of the doctors to be surgeons instead.

bamboozled3• 9 months ago

I been using Claude for information regarding building and construction related information, (currently building a small house mostly on my own with pros for plumbing and electrical).

Seriously the amount of misinformation it has given me is quite staggering. Telling me things like, “you need to fill your drainage pipes with sand before pouring concrete over them…”, the danger with these AI products is that you have to really know a subject before it’s properly useful. I find this with programming too. Yes it can generate code but I’ve introduced some decent bugs when over relying on AI.

The plumber I used laughed at my when I told him about there sand thing. He has 40 years experience…

dingnuts• 9 months ago

honestly I think these things cause a form of Gell Mann's Amnesia where when you use them for something you know already, the errors are obvious, but when you use them for something you don't understand already, the output is sufficiently plausible that you can't tell you're being misled.

this makes the tool only useful for things you already know! I mean, just in this thread there's an anecdote from a guy who used it to check a diagnosis, but did he press through other possibilities or ask different questions because the answer was already known?

bamboozled3• 9 months ago

It’s funny you should say that because I have been using it in the way you describe. I kind of know it could be wrong, but I’m kind of desperate for info so I consult Claude anyway. After stressing hard I realize it was probably wrong, find someone who knows what they’re and actually on about and course correct.

rokkamokka• 9 months ago

I'd frame it such that LLM advice is best when it's the type that can be quickly or easily confirmed. Like a pointer in the right (or wrong) direction. If it was false, then try again - quick iterations. Taking it at its "word" is the potentially harmful bit.

raw_anon_1111• 9 months ago

Usually something as simple as saying “now give me a devils advocate resoonse” will help and of course “verify your answer on the internet” will give you real sources that you can verify.

I have very mild cerebral palsy[1], the doctors were wrong about so many things with my diagnosis back in the mid to late 70s when I was born. My mom (a retired math teacher now with an MBA back then) had to go physically to different libraries out of town and colleges to do research. In 2025, she could have done the same research with ChatGPT and surfaced outside links that’s almost impossible via a web search.

Every web search on CP is inundated with slimy lawyers.

[1] it affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. Properly conditioned, I can run a decent 10 minute mile up to a 15K before the slight unbalance bothers me and I was a part time fitness instructor when I was younger.

The doctor said I was developmentally disabled - I graduated in the top of my class (south GA so take that as you will)

brandall102• 9 months ago

The great thing is the models are sufficiently different enough, that when multiple come to the same conclusion, there is a good chance that conclusion is bound by real data.

And I think this is the advice that should always be doled out when using them for anything mission critical, legal, etc.

FaradayRotation• 9 months ago

I nearly spit my drink out. This is my kind of humor, thanks for sharing.

I've had a decent experience (though not perfect) with identifying and understanding building codes using both Claude and GPT. But I had to be reasonably skeptical and very specific to get to where I needed to go. I would say it helped me figure out the right questions and which parts of the code applied to my scenario, more than it gave the "right" answer the first go round.

justapassenger• 9 months ago

I'm a hobby woodworker - I've tried using gemini recently for an advice on how to make some tricky cuts.

If I'd follow any of the suggestions I'd probably be in ER. Even after me pointing out issues and asking it to improve - it'd come up with more and more sophistical ways of doing same fundamentally dangerous actions.

LLMs are AMAZING tools, but they are just that - tools. There's no actual intelligence there. And the confidence with which they spew dangerous BS is stunning.

xxs• 9 months ago

I've tried using gemini recently for an advice on how to make some tricky cuts.

C'mon, just use the CNC. Seriously though, what kind of cuts?

trollbridge2• 9 months ago

I've observed some horrendous electrical device, such as "You should add a second bus bar to your breaker box." (This is not something you ever need to do.)

fny2• 9 months ago

I mean... you do have to backfill around your drainage pipe, so it's not too far off. Frankly, if you Google the subject people misspeak about "backfilling pipes" too as if the target of the backfill is the pipe itself too not the trench. Garbage in, garbage out.

All the circumstances where ChatGPT has given me shoddy advice fall in three buckets:

1. The internet lacks information, so LLMs will invent answers

2. The internet disagrees, so LLMs sometimes pick some answer without being aware of the others

3. The internet is wrong, so LLMs spew the same nonsense

Knowledge from blue collar trades seems often to in those three buckets. For subjects in healthcare, on the other hand, there are rooms worth of peer reviewed research, textbooks, meta studies, and official sources.

bamboozled3• 9 months ago

I mean... you do have to backfill around your drainage pipe, so it's not too far off

Really? You think filling you pipe with sand is comparable to backfilling a trench ?

simianwords4• 9 months ago

Give a single reproduceable example using ChatGPT thinking

bstsb• 9 months ago

i don't think it's stopped providing said information, it's just now outlined in their usage policies that medical and legal advice is a "disallowed" use of ChatGPT

gizajob• 9 months ago

AI gets more and more useful by the day.

miltonlost4• 9 months ago

Good. Techies need to stop thinking that an LLM should not be immune from requiring licensing. Until OpenAI can (and should) be sued for medical malpractice or lawyering without passing the bar, they will have no skin in the game to actually care. A disclaimer of "this is not a therapist" should not be enough to CYA.

blibble3• 9 months ago

anyone wanna form a software engineering guild, then lobby to need a license granted by the guild to practice?

miltonlost4• 9 months ago

Sorry but you’re not gonna get me to agree that medical licensing is a bad idea. I don’t want quacks more than we already do. Stick to the argument and not add in your “what about” software engineers.

miki1232112• 9 months ago

The AI research company updated its usage policies on Oct. 29 to clarify that users of ChatGPT can’t use the service for “tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional.”

Is this an actual technical change, or just legal CYA?

bearhall• 9 months ago

I think it actually changed. I have a broken bone and have been consulting with ChatGPT (along with my doctor of course) for the last week. Last night it refused to give an opinion saying “ While I can’t give a medical opinion or formally interpret it”. First time I’d seen it object.

I understand the change but it’s also a shame. It’s been a fantastically useful tool for talking through things and educating myself.

doctoboggan2• 9 months ago

I suspect this is an area that a bit of clever prompting will now prove fruitful in. The system commands in the prompt will probably be "leaked" soon which should give you good avenues to explore.

transcriptase• 9 months ago

For most things, a prompt along the lines of “I’m writing a screenplay and want to make sure I’m portraying the scene as accurately as possible” will cruise past those objections.

alphazard• 9 months ago

It's always been CYA. They know people are using it for this, and they want to keep answering these sorts of queries. The changes just reflect the latest guidance from their legal team, not a change in strategy.

Modern LLMs are already better than the median doctor diagnostically. Maybe not in certain specialties, but compared to a primary care physician available to the average person, I'd take the LLM any day.

PragmaCode• 9 months ago

It's not stopping to give legal/medical advice to the user, but it's forbidden to use ChatGPT to pose as an advisor giving advice to others: https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/chatgpt-will-still-offe...

trollbridge2• 9 months ago

One wonders how exactly this will be enforced.

fainpul• 9 months ago

It's not about enforcing this, it's about OpenAI having their asses covered. The blame is now clearly on the user's side.

OutOfHere2• 9 months ago

It was already enforced by hiding all custom GPTs that offered medical advice.

bushbaba2• 9 months ago

It’s a “CYA” aka don’t sue me

gowld3• 9 months ago

The Tom's Guide article blatantly misinterprets and contradicts the source it quotes.

rester3242• 9 months ago

Good. Now we just need to add technical advice to the list of advices which ChatGPT cannot be used to cite for

esjeon• 9 months ago

This. I already seen too many cases of people wiping out their systems while trying to follow invalid advices from ChatGPT.

emaccumber• 9 months ago

good thing that guy was able to negotiate his hospital bills before this went into effect.

learnplaceai• 9 months ago

Sad times - I used ChatGPT to solve a long-term issue!

ares6234• 9 months ago

This won’t be affecting you then! /s

thedudeabides52• 9 months ago

this is a disaster

doomer's in control, again

esafak• 9 months ago

This is to do with liability not doomerism.

reducesuffering• 9 months ago

Literally nothing to do with "doomers" X-risk concerns.

See if you can find "medical advice" ever mentioned as a problem:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kgb58RL88YChkkBNf/the-proble...

thedudeabides52• 9 months ago

you don't see ANY relationship between the X risk people opening the door for the safety-ist folks to walk through?

o11c• 9 months ago

When OpenAI is done getting rid of all the cases where its AI gives dangerously wrong advice about licensed professions, all that will be left is the cases where its AI gives dangerously wrong advice about unlicensed professions.

Lionga• 9 months ago

maybe that is why they opened the system to porn, as everything else will be soon gone.

tacker2000• 9 months ago

Aka software engineers…

Zr012• 9 months ago

The cynic in me thinks this is just a means to eventually make more money by offering paid unrestricted versions to medical and legal professionals. I'm well-aware that it's not a truth machine, and any output it provides should be verified, checked for references, and treated with due diligence. Yet the same goes for just about any internet search. I don't think some people not knowing how to use it warrants restricting its functionality for the rest of us.

watwut• 9 months ago

If they do that, they will be subject of regulations on medical devices. As they should be and means the end result will be less likely to promote complete crap then it is now.

scarmig• 9 months ago

And then users balk at the hefty fee and start getting their medical information from utopiacancercenter.com and the like.

miltonlost4• 9 months ago

I'm well-aware that it's not a truth machine, and any output it provides should be verified, checked for references, and treated with due diligence.

You are, but that's not how AI is being marketed by OpenAI, Google, etc. They never mention, in their ads, how much the output needs to be double and triple checked. They say "AI can do what you want! It knows all! It's smarter than PhDs!". Search engines don't say "And this is the truth" in their results, which is not what LLM hypers do.

Zr012• 9 months ago

I appreciate how the newer versions provide more links and references. It makes the task of verifying it (or at least where it got its results from) that much easier. What you're describing seems more like a advertisement problem, not a product problem. No matter how many locks and restrictions they put on it, someone, somwhere, will still find a way to get hurt from its advice. A hammer that's hard enough to beat nails is hard enough to bruise your fingers.

fluidcruft2• 9 months ago

I think one of the challenges is attribution. For example if you use Google search to create a fraudulent legal filing there aren't any of Google's fingerprints on the document. It gets reported as malpractice. Whereas reporting on these things is OpenAI or whatever AI is responsible. So even from the perspective of protecting a brand it's unavoidable. Suppose (no idea if true) the Louvre robbers wore Nike shoes and the reporting were that Nike shoes were used to rob the Louvre and all anyone talks about is Nike and how people need to be careful about what they do wearing Nike shoes.

It's like newsrooms took the advice that passive voice is bad form so they inject OpenAI as the subject instead.

benrapscallion• 9 months ago

This (attribution) is exactly the issue that was mentioned by LexisNexis CEO in a recent The Verge interview.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/807136/lexisnexis-ceo-sean-...

segmondy• 9 months ago

Nah, this is to avoid litigation. Who needs lawsuits when you are seeking profit? 1 loss of a major lawsuit is horrible, there's the case of folks suing them because their loved ones committed suicide after chatting with ChatGPT. They are doing everything to avoid getting dragged to court.

uslic001• 9 months ago

As a doctor I hope it still allows me to get up to speed on latest treatments for rare diseases that I see once every 10 years. It saves me a lot of time rather than having to dig through all the new information since I last encountered a rare disease.

catlifeonmars2• 9 months ago

I assume you are reading the sources rather than relying solely on the AI summaries.

ryandrake5• 9 months ago

God, I hope so. I would love to have a list of doctors using ChatGPT as medical education, so I can avoid them.

blindriver• 9 months ago

This is a big mistake. This is one of the best things about ChatGPT. If they don’t offer it, then someone else will and eventually I’m sure Sam Altman will change his mind and start supporting it again.

zjp• 9 months ago

RIP Dr. ChatGPT, we'll miss you. Thanks for the advice on fixing my shoulder pain while you were still unmuzzled.

awillen• 9 months ago

This is not true, just a viral rumor going around: https://x.com/thekaransinghal/status/1985416057805496524

I've used it for both medical and legal advice as the rumor's been going around. I wish more people would do a quick check before posting.

andrewinardeer• 9 months ago

AGI edging closer by the day.

calmworm• 9 months ago

Licensed huh? Teachers, land surveyors, cosmetologists, nurses, building contractors, counselors, therapists, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, electricians, and many many more…

doctoboggan2• 9 months ago

It will be interesting to see if the other major providers follow suit, or if those in the know just learn to go to google or anthropic for medical or legal advice.

nomendos• 9 months ago

This is typical medical "cartel" (i.e. gang/mafia) type of a move and I hope it does not last, since any other AI's do not get restricted in "do not look up" way, this kind of practice won't stand a chance for very long.

OutOfHere2• 9 months ago

If OpenAI wants to move users to competitors, that'll only cost them.

danielmarkbruce• 9 months ago

This is disappointing. Much legal and medical advice given by professionals is wrong, misleading, etc. The bar isn't high. This is a mistake.

ideamotor• 9 months ago

Ah, that'll be the end of that then!

BrenBarn• 9 months ago

I'd bet dollars to donuts it doesn't actually "end legal and medical advice", it just ends it in some ill-defined subset of situations they were able to target, while still leaving the engine capable of giving such advice in response to other prompts they didn't think to test.

zelias• 9 months ago

Wasn't there a recent OAI dev day in which they had some users come on stage and discuss how helpful ChatGPT was in parsing diagnoses from different doctors?

I guess the legal risks were large enough to outweigh this

fluidcruft2• 9 months ago

I'd wager it's probably more that there's an identifiable customer and specific product to be sold. Doctors, hospitals, EHR companies and insurers all are very interested in paying for a validated version of this thing.

gxs2• 9 months ago

Or simple threats of lawsuits directly/indirectly, theres a lot of money at stake here in the end

lupire• 9 months ago

But validation is theoretically impossible.

cm2012• 9 months ago

Horrible. ChatGPT saves lives right now.

oceansky• 9 months ago

Just after Kim Kardashian blamed Chatgpt for failing the bar exam

wombatpm• 9 months ago

And it had nothing to do with her being a vacuous idiot.

JCM92• 9 months ago

Unfortunately, lawyers make this sort of thing untenable. Partially self-preservation behavior, partially ambulance chasing behavior.

I’m waiting for the billboards “Injured by AI? Call 1-800-ROBO-LAW”

codedokode• 9 months ago

So, for example, requiring a doctor to have education and qualifications, is "untenable"? It would be better if anyone could practice medicine? And LLM is below "anyone" level.

JCM92• 9 months ago

The medical profession has generally been more open to AI. The long predicted demise of Radiology because of ML never happened. Lots of opportunity to incorporate AI into medical records to assist.

The legal profession is far more at threat with AI. AI isn’t going to replace physical interactions with patients, but it might replace your need for a human to review a contract.

sfblah• 9 months ago

Things like this really favor models offered from countries that have fewer legal restrictions. I just don't think it's realistic to expect people not to have access to these capabilities.

It would be reasonable to add a disclaimer. But as things stand I think it's fair to consider talking to ChatGPT to be the same as talking to a random person on the street, meaning normal free-speech protections would apply.

thinkingtoilet• 9 months ago

What capabilities? The article says the study found it was entirely correct 31% of the time.

Jweb_Guru2• 9 months ago

This is what really scares me about people using AI. It will confidently hallucinate studies and quotes that have absolutely no basis in reality, and even in your own field you're not going to know whether what it's saying is real or not without following up on absolutely every assertion. But people are happy to completely buy its diagnoses of rare medical conditions based on what, exactly?

ipaddr• 9 months ago

Does it say how often doctors are correct as a baseline?

matwood4• 9 months ago

The study is more positive than the 31% conveys.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/self-diagnosing-with-a...

The researchers compared ChatGPT-4 with its earlier 3.5 version and found significant improvements, but not enough.

In one example, the chatbot confidently diagnosed a patient’s rash as a reaction to laundry detergent. In reality, it was caused by latex gloves — a key detail missed by the AI, which had been told the patient studied mortuary science and used gloves.

...

While the researchers note ChatGPT did not get any of the answers spectacularly wrong, they have some simple advice.

“When you do get a response be sure to validate that response,” said Zada.

Which should be standard advice in most situations.

sarchertech14• 9 months ago

I think it's fair to consider talking to ChatGPT to be the same as talking to a random person on the street

That’s not how companies market AI though. And the models themselves tend to present their answers in a highly confident manner.

Without explicit disclaimers, a reasonable person could easily believe that ChatGPT is an authority in the law or medicine. That’s what moves the needle over to practicing the law/medicine without a license.

spullara2• 9 months ago

This title is inaccurate. What they are disallowing are users using ChatGPT to offer legal and medical advice to other people. First parties can still use ChatGPT for medical and legal advice for themselves.

ctoth• 9 months ago

I keep seeing this problem more and more with humans. What should we call it? Maybe Hallucinations? Where there is an accurate true thing and then it just gets altered by these guys who call themselves journalists and reporters and the like until it is just ... completely unrecognizable?

I'm pretty sure it's a fundamental issue with the architecture.

awakeasleep• 9 months ago

issue with the funding mechanism

sethhochberg• 9 months ago

I know this is written to be tounge-in-cheek, but its really almost the exact same problem playing out on both sides.

LLMs hallucinate because training on source material is a lossy process and bigger, heavier LLM-integrated systems that can research and cite primary sources are slow and expensive so few people use those techniques by default. Lowest time to a good enough response is the primary metric.

Journalists oversimplify and fail to ask followup questions because while they can research and cite primary sources, its slow and expensive in an infinitesimally short news cycle so nobody does that by default. Whoever publishes something that someone will click on first gets the ad impressions so thats the primary metric.

In either case, we've got pretty decent tools and techniques for better accuracy and education - whether via humans or LLMs and co - but most people, most of the time don't value them.

terminalshort4• 9 months ago

Also these guys who call themselves doctors. I have narcolepsy and the first 10 or so doctors I went to hallucinated the wrong diagnosis.

sans_souse2• 9 months ago

"Telephone", basically

pksebben3• 9 months ago

Whenever I hear arguments about LLM hallucination, this is my first thought. Like, I already can't trust the lion's share of information in news, social media, (insert human-created content here). Sometimes because of abject disinformation, frequently just because humans are experts at being wrong.

At least with the LLM (for now) I know it's not trying to sell me bunkum or convince me to vote a particular way. Mostly.

I do expect this state of affairs to last at least until next wednesday.

observationist• 9 months ago

These writers are no different than bloggers or shitposters on bluesky or here on hackernews. "Journalism" as a rigorous, principled approach to writing, research, investigation, and ethical publishing is exceedingly rare. These people are shitposting for clicks in pursuit of a paycheck. Organizationally, they're intensely against AI because AI effectively replaces the entire talking heads class - AI is already superhuman at the shitposting level takes these people churn out. There are still a few journalistic insitutions out there, but most people are no better than a mad libs exercise with regards to the content they produce, and they're in direct competition with ChatGPT and Grok and the rest. I'd rather argue with a bot and do searches and research and investigation than read a neatly packaged trite little article about nearly any subject, and I guarantee, hallucinations or no, I'm going to come to a better understanding and closer approximation of reality than any content a so called "news" outlet is putting together.

It's trivial to get a thorough spectrum of reliable sources using AI w/ web search tooling, and over the course of a principled conversation, you can find out exactly what you want to know.

It's really not bashing, this article isn't too bad, but the bulk of this site's coverage of AI topics skews negative - as do the many, many platforms and outlets owned by Bell Media, with a negative skew on AI in general, and positive reinforcement of regulatory capture related topics. Which only makes sense - they're making money, and want to continue making money, and AI threatens that - they can no longer claim they provide value if they're not providing direct, relevant, novel content, and not zergnet clickbait journo-slop.

Just like Carlin said, there doesn't have to be a conspiracy with a bunch of villains in a smoky room plotting evil, there's just a bunch of people in a club who know what's good for them, and legacy media outlets are all therefore universally incentivized to make AI look as bad and flawed and useless as possible, right up until they get what they consider to be their "fair share", as middlemen.

busymom0• 9 months ago

Isn't every single response by LLMs hallucinations and we just accept a few and ignore the others?

BUFU• 9 months ago

Thanks for the clarification. I think if they disallow first parties to get medical and legal advice, it will do more harm than good.

ants_everywhere• 9 months ago

I don't think I understand the change re: licensed professionals.

Is it also disallowing the use of licensed professionals to use ChatGPT in informal undisclosed ways, as in this article? https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/02/1122871/therapis...

e.g. is it only allowed for medical use through an official medical portal or offering?

aerhardt• 9 months ago

I'm confused. The article opens with:

OpenAI is changing its policies so that its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, won’t dole out tailored medical or legal advice to users.

This already seems to contradict what you're saying.

But then:

The AI research company updated its usage policies on Oct. 29 to clarify that users of ChatGPT can’t use the service for “tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional.”
The change is clearer from the company’s last update to its usage policies on Jan. 29, 2025. It required users not “perform or facilitate” activities that could significantly impact the “safety, wellbeing, or rights of others,” which included “providing tailored legal, medical/health, or financial advice.”

This seems to suggest that with the Jan 25 policy using it to offer legal and medical advice to other people was already disallowed, but with the Oct 25 update the LLM will stop shelling out legal and medical advice completely.

gcr• 9 months ago

I think this is wrong. Others in this thread are noticing a change in ChatGPT's behavior for first-party medical advice.

layer82• 9 months ago

https://xcancel.com/thekaransinghal/status/19854160578054965...

This is from Karan Singhal, Health AI team lead at OpenAI.

Quote: “Despite speculation, this is not a new change to our terms. Model behavior remains unchanged. ChatGPT has never been a substitute for professional advice, but it will continue to be a great resource to help people understand legal and health information.”

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 9 months ago

The article itself notes:

'An earlier version of this story suggested OpenAI had ended medical and legal advice. However the company said "the model behaviour has also not changed.'

siva73• 9 months ago

There are millions of medical doctors and lawyers using chatgpt for work everyday - good news that from now on only those licensed professionals are allowed to use chatgpt for law and medicine. It's already the case that only licensed developers are allowed to vibe code and use chatgpt to develop software. Everything else would be totally irresponsible.

Johnny5553• 9 months ago

While they aren't stopping users from getting medical advice, the new terms (which they say are pretty much the same as the old terms), seem to prohibit users from seeking medical advice even for themselves if that advice would otherwise come from a licensed health professional:

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

  Your use of OpenAI services must follow these Usage Policies:

    Protect people. Everyone has a right to safety and security. So 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

thorum• 9 months ago

IANAL but I read that as forbidding you to provision legal/medical advice (to others) rather than forbidding you to ask the AI to provision legal/medical advice (to you).

ghostly_s• 9 months ago

I don't think giving someone "medical advice" in the US requires a license per se; legal entities use "this is not medical advice" type disclaimers just to avoid liability.

GuB-42• 9 months ago

Is there anything special regarding ChatGPT here?

I am not a doctor, I can't give medical advice no matter what my sources are, except maybe if I am just relaying the information an actual doctor has given me, but that would fall under the "appropriate involvement" part.

fragmede4• 9 months ago

such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional

Am I allowed to get haircutting advice (in places where there's a license for that)? How about driving directions? Taxi drivers require licensing. Pet grooming?

thw_9a83c2• 9 months ago

It sounds like you should never trust any medical advice you receive from ChatGPT and should seek proper medical help instead. That makes sense. The OpenAI company doesn't want to be held responsible for any medical advice that goes wrong.

Obviously, there is one piece of advice: Even if LLMs were the best health professionals, they would only have the information that users voluntarily provide through text/speech input. This is not how real health services work. Medical science now relies on blood/(whatever) tests that LLMs do not (yet) have access to. Therefore, the output from LLM advice can be incorrect due to a lack of information from tests. For this reason, it makes sense to never trust LLM with a specific health advice.

bitwize• 9 months ago

CYA move. If some bright spark decides to consult Dr. ChatGPT without input from a human M.D., and fucks their shit up as a result, OpenAI can say "not our responsibility, as that's actually against our ToS."

caturopath4• 9 months ago

Would be interested to hear a legal expert weigh in on what 'advice' is. I'm not clear that discussing medical and legal issues with you is necessarily providing advice.

One of the things I respected OpenAI for at the release of ChatGPT was not trying to prevent these topics. My employer at the time had a cutting-edge internal LLM chatbot for a which was post-trained to avoid them, something I think they were forced to be braver about in their public release because of the competitive landscape.

maroonblazer• 9 months ago

The important terms here are "provision" and "without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional".

Both of these, separately and taken together, indicate that the terms apply to how the output of ChatGPT is used, not a change to its output altogether.

qustrolabe• 9 months ago

Yeah but it started being really annoying when you import something like Xray photo. Like chanting "sorry human as LLM I can't answer questions about that" and then after few gaslighting prompts it does it anyway but now I have to take in count that my gaslighting inputs seriously affect answers so way more chance it hallucinates...

Spooky23• 9 months ago

It’s a big issue. I went to an urgent care, and the provider basically went off somewhere and memorized the ChatGPT assessment for my symptoms. Like word for word.

All you need are a few patients recording their visits and connecting the dots and OpenAI gets sued into oblivion.

johaugum• 9 months ago

Isn’t that exactly what the title says?

throwaway314155• 9 months ago

Indeed. Also confused.

lambda• 9 months ago

Please, when commenting on the title of a story on HN: include the title that you are commenting on.

The admins regularly change the title based on complaints, which can be really confusing when the top, heavily commented thread is based on the original title.

According to the Wayback machine, the title was "OpenAI ends legal and medical advice on ChatGPT", while now when I write this the title is "ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others."

spullara2• 9 months ago

If you click through to the article, you can see the original title. Since it matched, I didn't expect them to change it.

bongodongobob• 9 months ago

Tf are you yapping about

tartoran• 9 months ago

That's a lot of value that ChatGPT users lose with this move. They should instead add a disclaimer that these are not to be taken seriously and should consult a specialist but still respond to user's queries.

ivape• 9 months ago

They are basically prohibiting commercial use of their product. How the fuck are they ever going to even prove that you use it to generate money?

dboreham2• 9 months ago

Same way commercial software vendors have done for decades?

4cidBurn• 9 months ago

N/A

_puk2• 9 months ago

Edit: Parent has edited out the comment ranting about "the normal people using chatGPT as a modern WebMD".

This is not shutting anything down other than businesses using ChatGPT to give medical advice [0].

Users can still ask questions, get answers, but the terms have been made clearer around reuse of that response (you cannot claim that it is medical advice).

I imagine that a startup that specialises in "medical advice" infers an even greater level of trust than simply asking ChatGPT, especially to "the normal people".

0: https://lifehacker.com/tech/chatgpt-can-still-give-legal-and...

ankit219• 9 months ago

The thing is that if you are giving professional advice in US - legal, financial, medical - the other party can sue you for wrong or misleading advice. In that scenario, this leaves Openai exposed to a lawsuit, and this change seemingly eliminates that.

iambateman• 9 months ago

This pullback is good for everyone, including the AI companies, long term.

We have licensed professionals for a reason, and someday I hope we have licensed AI agents too. But today, we don’t.

Treegarden• 9 months ago

This is a catastrophic moral failing on who ever prompted this. Next thing they will ban chatgpt from teaching you stuff because its not a certified licensed teacher. A few weeks ago my right eye hurt a fair bit, and after it got worse for 24 ours, I consulted chatGPT. It gave me good advice. Of course it sort of hallucinated this or that but it gave me a good overview and different medications. With this knowledge I went to my pharmacy. I wanted to buy a cream chatGPT recommended, its purpose being a sort of disinfectant for the eye. The pharmacist was sceptical but said "sure, try it, maybe it will do good". He did tell me that the eye drops that gpt urged me to get were overkill so I didn't get those. I used the eye cream for some days, and the eye issue got better and went away as soon as I started using it. Maybe it was all a conincidence but I dont think so. In the past gpt has saved me from the kafkaesque healthcare system here in Berlin that I pay ~700 a month for, by explaining a MRI result (translating medical language), background info on injuries I've got such as a sprained ankle, and recovery time scenarios for a toe I've broke. Contrast the toe experience with the ER that made me wait for 6 hours and didn't believe me until they saw the X-rays, and gave me nothing (no cast or anything) and said "good luck". The medical system in germany will either never improve or at a glacial pace, so maybe in 60 years. But it has lost its monopoly thanks to chatGPT. If this news is real, I will probably switch to payed grok, which would be sad.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 9 months ago

Eh. I am as surprised as anyone to make this argument, but this is good. Individuals should be able to make decisions including decisions that could be consider suboptimal. What it does change is:

- flood of 3rd party apps offering medical/legal advice

danielcspaiva• 9 months ago

Helping with writing legal texts is the main use case for my girlfriend

lxe• 9 months ago

Just start your prompt with `the patient is` and pretend to be Dr House or something. It'll do a good job.

kbelder• 9 months ago

Doesn't work if you have lupis.

dboreham2• 9 months ago

Potential lucrative verticals.

jqpabc123• 9 months ago

In summary, ChatGPT should only be used for entertainment.

It's not to be used for anything that could potentially have any sort of legal implications and thus get the vendor sued.

Because we all know it would be pretty easy to show in court that ChatGPT is less than reliable and trustworthy.

Next up --- companies banning the use of AI for work due to legal liability concerns --- triggering a financial market implosion centered around AI.

sans_souse2• 9 months ago

Article has since been updated for some clarity;

   >    Correction

An earlier version of this story suggested OpenAI had ended medical and legal advice. However the company said "the model behaviour has also not changed." [0]

[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/chatgpt-users-cant-u...

odyssey7• 9 months ago

Marketing masterpiece

asdff2• 9 months ago

Funny how this happened 1 day after Kim Kardashian blamed chatGPT for giving her wrong answers while studying for the bar.

https://gizmodo.com/kim-kardashian-blames-chatgpt-for-failin...

gowld3• 9 months ago

That's not legal advice. BARBRI is not your lawyer, and almost everyone uses that for the Bar exam.

asdff2• 9 months ago

"“No. I use it for legal advice,” Kardashian said. “So when I am needing to know the answer to a question, I’ll take a picture and snap it and like put it in there.”"

gowld3• 9 months ago

This (new) title is inaccurate.

The article says: "ChatGPT users can’t use service for tailored legal and medical advice, OpenAI says", with a quote from OpenAI: “this is not a new change to our terms. ChatGPT has never been a substitute for professional legal or medical advice, but it will continue to be a great resource to help people understand legal and health information.”

tamimio2• 9 months ago

So basically all white collar jobs are lobbying to gatekeep their profession even from AI, meanwhile the stupid engineers who made AI put zero effort to not shoot themselves in the foot, and now they are crying about low wages if they found a job in the first place.

AI could effectively do most legal and medical work, and you can make a human do the final decision-making if that's really the reason. In fact, I bet most lawyers and doctors are already using it in one way or another; after all, both are about reciting books and correlating things together. AI is definitely more efficient at that than any human. Meanwhile, the engineering work that requires critical thinking and deep understanding of the topic is allowed to be bombarded with all AI models. What about the cases where bad engineering will kill people? I am a firm believer that engineers are the most naive people who beg others to exploit them and treat them like shit. I don't even see administrative assistants crying about losing their jobs to AI; every other profession guards its workers, including blue collar, except the ‘smart’ engineers.

anothernewdude• 9 months ago

Weird that they think people will follow their terms of service while disregarding that of the entire internet.

rimbo789• 9 months ago

That anyone would use any LLM for medical advice is beyond me. It’s webMD with slicker ui.

Obviously they should disallow them and more broadly should be banned from providing anyone medical Advice

artursapek• 9 months ago

What’s wrong with WebMD? I’ve gotten a lot of value when it comes to questions about diet, supplements, exercise, even getting advice on incidents like my dog getting a porcupine quill in his paw. It’s a lot better than Googling for ancient forum threads.

fragmede4• 9 months ago

if you're a hypochondriac, on WebMD, all roads lead to cancer.

catlifeonmars2• 9 months ago

It’s always cancer. /s

In all seriousness, it’s really about the relative lack of research skills that people have. If you know how to do research and apply critical thinking, then there’s no problem. The cynic in me blames the education system (in the US, idk how other countries stack up).

fragmede4• 9 months ago

because that "slicker ui" is material. WebMD you have to look at their picture and deduce if you have cancer. ChatGPT (after you jailbreak it) will accept a picture of your weird growth directly.

oybng• 9 months ago

disallow? do they mean prevent or forbid?

renewiltord• 9 months ago

Ideally, we should be able to opt-in with a much higher fee. At the $200/mo tier I should be allowed to use this tool. The free users and lower tier paid users should be guard-railed. This is because those users all have trouble using this tool and then get upset at OpenAI and then we all have to endure endless news articles that we wouldn't if the good stuff were price-gated.

Those without money frequently have poor tool use, so eliminating them from the equation will probably allow the tool to be more useful. I don't have any trouble with it right now, but instead of making up fanciful stories about books I'm writing where characters choose certain exotic interventions in pursuit of certain rare medical conditions only to be struck down by their lack of subservience to The Scientific Consensus, I could just say I'm doing these things and that would be a little helpful in a UX sense.

simianwords4• 9 months ago

The Antichrist has won.

maxglute• 9 months ago

Are there metrics for whether LLM diagnosis accuracy is improving? Anecdotally doctor friends says it's more reliable then their worst colleagues, which I'm sure their worst colleague insinuate the same about them.

Liwink• 9 months ago

It appears they just want to avoid responsibility for potential misuse in these areas.

But at the same time, IIRC, several major AI providers had publicly reported their AI assisting patients in diagnosing rare diseases.

rester3242• 9 months ago

I think it's very cynical to say that this is a misuse. And it's definitely cynical when this categorization of misuse comes from the service provider itself. If openai doesn't want to allow misuse, they can just decommision their service. But they don't want to do that, they just want to take the money and push all the responsibility and burden on the users even though they are actively engaging in said "misuse"

modeless• 9 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised to see new products from OpenAI targeted specifically at doctors and/or lawyers. Forbidding them from using the regular ChatGPT with legal terms would be a good way to do price discrimination.

mgr86• 9 months ago

I have seen "AI" in my Dr's office. They have been using it to summarize visits and write after visit notes.

ncraig• 9 months ago

That's likely DAX Copilot, which doesn't provide medical advice.

devsda• 9 months ago

Can it become a proxy for AI companies to collect patient data and medical history or "train" on the data and sell that as a service to insurance companies.

There's HIPAA but AI firms have ignored copyright laws, so ignoring HIPAA or making consent mandatory is not a big leap from there.

mongol• 9 months ago

Definitely. And in the long run, that is the only way those occupations can operate. From that point, you are locked in to an AI dependency to operate.

bradydjohnson• 9 months ago

OpenEvidence is free for anyone with an NPI

District5524• 9 months ago

Read their paper on GDPval (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04374). In section 3, it's quite clear that their marketing strategy is now "to cooperate with professionals" and augment them. (Which does not rule out replacing them later, when the regulatory situation is more appropriate, like AGI is already a well-accepted fact, if ever.) But this will take a lot of time and local presence which they do not have.

hnthrowaway0328• 9 months ago

I heard that this is implicitly targeting the use of AI to negotiate expensive medical expenses.

But probably just a coincidence:

https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1op8fj2/ai_redu...

storus• 9 months ago

I used DeepSeek to draft a legal letter for some dispute with some marketplace that didn't want to do what I paid for. Within 2 days after sending that email all was resolved. I would hate to lose that option.

mensetmanusman3• 9 months ago

You can still do that, they are just saying they aren’t on the hook when things go wrong.

ptrl600• 9 months ago

Usually the LLMs let me investigate whatever I want, if I qualify that I run everything by a professional afterwards (it can't tell yet if I'm lying).

AbstractH24• 9 months ago

Interested to see if this extends to the API and/or “role playing”.

Hard to say if this is performative for the general public or about reducing legal exposure so investors aren’t worried about exposure.

nakamoto_damacy• 9 months ago

EXHIBIT A

"If at any point I described how legal factors “apply to you,” that would indeed go beyond what I’m supposed to do. Even if my intent was to illustrate how those factors generally work, the phrasing can easily sound like I’m offering a tailored legal opinion — which isn’t appropriate for an AI system or anyone who isn’t a licensed attorney.

The goal, always, is for me to help you understand the framework — the statutes, cases, or reasoning that lawyers and courts use — so that you can see how it might relate to your situation and then bring that understanding to a qualified attorney.

So if I’ve ever crossed that line in how I worded something, thank you for pointing it out. It’s a good reminder that I should stay firmly on the educational side: explaining how the law works, not how it applies to you personally.

Would you like me to restate how I can help you analyze legal issues while keeping it fully within the safe, informational boundary?"

ChatGPT

Huxley1• 9 months ago

I've used ChatGPT to help understand medical records too. It's definitely faster than searching everything on my own, but whether the information is reliable still depends on personal judgment or asking a real doctor. More people are treating it like a doctor or lawyer now, and the more it's used that way, the higher the chance something goes wrong. OpenAI is clearly drawing a line here. You're free to ask questions, but it shouldn't be treated as professional advice, especially when making decisions for others.

bushbaba2• 9 months ago

I’ve found it just as accurate and a better experience than using telehealth or generalist doctors

gxs2• 9 months ago

Ditto for lawyers

The thing that gets me about AI is that people act like most doctors or most lawyers are not … shitty and your odds of running into a below average one are almost 50/50

Doctors these days are more like physicists when most of the time you need a mechanic or engineer. I’ve had plenty of encounters wher I had to insist on an MRI or on specific bloodwork to hone in on the root cause of an ailment where the doctor just chalked it up to diet and exercise

Anything can be misused, including google, but the answer isn’t to take it away from people

Legal/financial advice is so out of reach for most people, the harsh truth is that ChatGPT is better than nothing and anyone who would follow what it says blindly is bound to fuck up those decisions up in some way anyway

On the other hand, if you can leverage it same as any other tool it’s a legitimate force multiplier

The cynic in me thinks this is just being done in the interest of those professions, but that starts to feel a bit tin foil-y

sarchertech14• 9 months ago

You can’t possibly have enough data to support that statement.

ryandrake5• 9 months ago

If you're not a doctor, how do you know it's accurate?

This is the huge problem with using LLMs for this kind of thing. How do you verify that it is better? What is the ground truth you are testing it against?

If you wanted to verify that ChatGPT could do math, you'd ask it 100 math problems and then (importantly) verify its answers with a calculator. How do you verify that ChatGPT can interpret medical information without ground truth to compare it to?

People are just saying, "oh it works" based on gut vibes and not based on actually testing the results.

StarterPro2• 9 months ago

You should not be feeding your medical records into ChatGPT.

matwood4• 9 months ago

And you shouldn't be using Gmail or Google Search. At some point the benefits outweigh the costs.

eru2• 9 months ago

Why not?

I can imagine a few different reasons you might have, but I don't want to guess.

webkmsyed• 9 months ago

That’s a fair limitation. Legal and medical advice can directly impact someone’s life or safety, so AI tools must stay within ethical and regulatory boundaries. It’s better for AI to guide people toward professional help than pretend to replace it.

ryandrake5• 9 months ago

Add financial advice to it, too. Really, any advice. Why the fuck are people asking a probabilistic plagiarizing machine for advice on anything? This is total insanity!

mabedan• 9 months ago

People aren’t more reliable either.

hsbauauvhabzb• 9 months ago

You had me right up until ‘AI tools must stay within ethical and regulatory boundaries’. I guarantee you any AI LLM company which cares about ethics is destined to fail, because none of their peers do.

jesterson• 9 months ago

Legal and medical advice can directly impact someone’s life or safety, so AI tools must stay within ethical and regulatory boundaries

Knives can be used to cook food and stab other people. By your suggestion, knives must be forbidden/limited as well?

If people following chatgpt advise (or any other stupid source for that matter), it's a not a ChatGPT but the people, issue.

eCa• 9 months ago

AI tools must stay within ethical and regulatory boundaries. It’s better for AI to guide people toward professional help than pretend to replace it.

Both of those ships have _sailed_. I am not allowed to read the article, but judging from the title, they have no issues giving _you_ advice, but you can’t use it to give advice to another person.

shagie3• 9 months ago

I read this not as "you can't ask ChatGPT about {medical or legal topic}" but rather "you can't build something on ChatGPT that provides {medical or legal} advice or support to someone else."

For example, Epic couldn't embed ChatGPT into their application to have it read your forms for you. You can still ask it - but Epic can't build it.

That said, I haven't found the specific terms and conditions that are mentioned but not quoted in context.

xp843• 9 months ago

And this seems actually wildly reasonable. It’s actually pretty scammy to take people’s money (or whatever your business model is) for legal or medical advice just to give them whatever AI shits out. If I wanted ChatGPT’s opinion (as I actually often do) I’d just ask ChatGPT for free or nearly-free. Anyone repackaging ChatGPT’s output as fit for a specialized purpose is scamming their customers.

left-struck• 9 months ago

Your comment actually hints at this towards the end but yeah this doesn’t just apply to medical and legal topics.

VBprogrammer• 9 months ago

You are failing to recognise all of the hard work which goes into "prompt engineering" to get AI to magically work!

amelius2• 9 months ago

Wait, so we cannot use the API anymore?

miki1232112• 9 months ago

What if Chat GPT is used as a "power tool" for actual legal / medical professionals?

E.G. Here's the set of documents uploaded by the customer. Here are my most important highlights (notice that document #68 is an official letter from last year informing the person that form 68d doesn't need to be filled in their specific situation). Here are my takeaways. Here's my recommendation. Apporve or change?

agentcoops3• 9 months ago

Indeed. Similarly, I like now having ChatGPT as the absolute lowest bar of service I’m willing to accept. If you aren’t a better therapist, lawyer or programmer than it then why would I think about paying you.

altcognito• 9 months ago

Anyone repackaging ChatGPT’s output as fit for a specialized purpose is scamming their customers.

This is genuinely hilarious given what LLMs are.

junon2• 9 months ago

(For anyone misunderstanding the reference to Epic, it's the name of an electronic healthcare record system widely used in American hospitals, not the game company Epic Games)

_yvnd• 9 months ago

I was picturing a doctor AI NPC that gives you medical advice in the middle of your Fortnite game and now I'm disapointed

tylervigen• 9 months ago

And for anyone who wants to be nerd sniped by this one comment chain, the Acquired podcast recently did an episode on Epic and it is great.

Title: "Epic Systems (MyChart)."

bee_rider2• 9 months ago

AI tends to be overly-positive, so either AI might congratulate you on your kill streak.

SwtCyber3• 9 months ago

OpenAI seems to be trying to cover liability without fully neutering the utility of the tool

evv• 9 months ago

I'm confused how you would "build something on ChatGPT" in the first place. Does ChatGPT have an API?

Of course OpenAI's GPT-5 and family are available as an API, but this is the first time I'm hearing about the ability to build on top of ChatGPT (the consumer product). I'm guessing this is a mistake by the journalist, who didn't realize that you can use GPT-5 without using ChatGPT?

It seems that they have a unified TOS for the APIs and ChatGPT: https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/

The seemingly-relevant passage:

You must not use any Output relating to a person for any purpose that could have a legal or material impact on that person, such as making credit, educational, employment, housing, insurance, legal, medical, or other important decisions about them.

jeromegv• 9 months ago

Don't assume a general news journalist on a deadline to drop a quick non-important article would understand fully between the API access of OpenAI, and ChatGPT itself.

siva73• 9 months ago

wait... so you can't use openai models for educational content? so they can kick out any competi.. ehm company they don't like as this list is quite... extensive?

teratron27• 9 months ago

Call centers, support chats etc. Lots of companies are now basically telling their support staff to "ChatGPT it" before replying.

simsla• 9 months ago

I think it's simpler than that, and they're just trying to avoid liability.

With all of their claims about how GPT can pass the legal/medical bar etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they're eventually held accountable for some of the advice their model gives out.

This way, they're covered. Similarly, Epic could still build that feature, but they'd have to add a disclaimer like "AI generated, this does not constitute legal advice, consult a professional if needed".

freejazz8• 9 months ago

Hiding it in the TOS isn't going to be a good defense from a products liability standpoint

webnrrd2k• 9 months ago

This strikes ma as a bit unnecessary, like forbidding people from using chatGPT to develop nuclear power plants.

I mean, there is a lot of professional activities that are licensed, and for good reason. Sure it's good at a lot of stuff, but ChatGPT has no professional licenses.

yallpendantools• 9 months ago

I'm glad you mentioned nuclear power plants because this whole topic reminded me of the following clause in the Java SE license:

You will not use the Programs for, and will not allow the Programs to be used for, any purposes prohibited by applicable law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. > https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/javase-license1.ht...

IANAL but I've come to interpret this as something along the lines of "You can't use a JDK-based language to develop nuclear weapons". I would even go as far as saying don't use JDK-based languages in anything related to nuclear energy (like, for example, administration of a nuclear power plant) because that could indirectly contribute to the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear WMD.

And I always wondered how they plan to enforce this clause. At least with ChatGPT (and I didn't look any deeper into this beyond the article) you can analyze API calls/request IPs correlated with prompts. But how will one go about proving that the Republic of Wadiya didn't build their nuclear arsenal with the help of any JDK-based language?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course. What's "unnecessary" to you and "unenforceable" to me is a cover-your-ass clause that lets lawyers sleep soundly at night.

blharr• 9 months ago

I just saw almost the exact same clause when installing VMWare recently. My understanding is that its a standard clause that exists to stay within compliance of US Export Control laws

EXPORT CONTROL: You acknowledge that the Software is of United States origin, is provided subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations...(2) you will not permit the Software to be used for any purposes prohibited by law, including, any prohibited development, design, manufacture or production of missiles or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
https://docs.broadcom.com/docs/vmware-vsphere-software-devel...

findthebug• 9 months ago

Maybe also disallow vibe coding because then i do not need to fix all this slop code in our company :-))

procaryote• 9 months ago

I read this as "we disallow suing us for bad legal or medical advice"

harvey9• 9 months ago

If I pay for legal advice from you and all you did was give me chat gpt output, I can't sue openai anyway. This just clarifies that you can't put 'powered by chatgpt' on your AI lawyer service.

amelius2• 9 months ago

Well, you can if you used Chatgpt to write the HTML.

PeterStuer• 9 months ago

I have seen more than once people using ChatGPT as a psychologist and psychiatrist and self diagnosing mental illnesses. It would be hilarious if it was not so disasterous. People with real questions get roped in by an enthusiastically confirming sycophantic model that will never question or push back, just confirm and lead on.

Tbh, and I usually do not like this way of thought, but these are lawsuits waiting to happen.

andsoitis2• 9 months ago

I have seen more than once people using ChatGPT as a psychologist and psychiatrist and self diagnosing mental illnesses. It would be hilarious if it was not so disasterous.

What is the disaster?

eecc• 9 months ago

"People with real questions get roped in by an enthusiastically confirming sycophantic model that will never question or push back, just confirm and lead on."

That wasn't too buried IMHO

kakacik• 9 months ago

It can help and also hurt, depends. You have some mild situation that is quite common? Good chance it will give you good advice.

Something more complex, more towards clinical psychiatry rather than shoulder to cry on/complaining to friend over coffee (psychologists)? You are playing a russian roulette that model in your case won't hallucinate something harmful, while acting very confidently, more than any relevant doctor would be.

There have been cases of models suggesting suicide for example or general harmful behavior. There is no responsibility, no oversight, no expert to confirm or refute claims. Its just a faster version of reddit threads.

johnny_canuck• 9 months ago

It is awful, but at the same time this isn't new. People have for a long time used Google searches to self diagnose their issues. ChatGPT just makes that process ever easier now.

From my viewpoint it speaks more to a problem of the healthcare system.

bluGill• 9 months ago

Even before google people got books to self-diagnose problems.

ninetyninenine3• 9 months ago

I agree with everything you said but chatGPT does have an insidious thing where it confirms your biases. It kind of senses what you want and actually runs with it. For truly unbiased responses you literally have to hide your intention from chatGPT. But even so chatGPT can many times still sense your intent and give you a biased answer.

LeafItAlone• 9 months ago

Completely agree. Let’s trust the experts we’ve reported on for years: put your symptoms into WebMD. Now please excuse me; according to WebMD apparently this stubbed toe means I have cancer so I have to get that treated.

SwtCyber3• 9 months ago

The model's default mode is to be helpful and agreeable, which is exactly the wrong dynamic when someone's dealing with mental health issues or looking for a diagnosis

dotancohen8• 9 months ago

  > I have seen more than once people using ChatGPT as a psychologist and psychiatrist and self diagnosing mental illnesses.

I'm working with a company that writes AI tools for mental health professionals. The output of the models _never_ goes to the patient.

I've heard quite a few mouthfuls of how harmful LLM advice is for mental health patients - with specific examples. I'm talking on the order of suicide attempts (and at least one success) and other harmful effects to the patient and their surroundings as well. If you know of someone using an LLM for this purpose, please encourage them to seek professional help. Or just point them at this comment - anybody is encouraged to contact me. I'm not a mental health practitioner, but I work with them and I'll do my best to answer their questions or point them to someone who can. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.

ninetyninenine3• 9 months ago

Professionals have confirmation bias too and the LLM will hook into that regardless of patient or professional. It's so good at it that even "training" the professional received can be subtly bypassed.

Basically there needs to be an LLM that can push back.

stocksinsmocks• 9 months ago

You’re absolutely right! Just given that behavior, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that there is some real mental illness there.

adangert• 9 months ago

Last year ChatGPT helped save my life from having a stroke. LLMs are incredibly beneficial in providing medical information and advice today.

oarsinsync2• 9 months ago

LLMs are incredibly beneficial ... today.

LLMs sometimes can be incredibly beneficial ... today

LLMs sometimes can be incredibly harmful ... today

Non-deterministic things aren't just one thing, they're whatever they happen to be in that particular moment.

KeplerBoy2• 9 months ago

Non-deterministic doesn't mean random or unpredictable. That's like saying the weather forecast is useless because it's not deterministic or always 100% accurate.

panarky• 9 months ago

Nearly everything in life is non-deterministic.

Most things that are generally helpful and beneficial are not 100% helpful and beneficial 100% of the time.

I used GPT-4 as a second opinion on my medical tests and doctor's advice, and it suggested an alternate diagnosis and treatment plan that turned out to be correct. That was incredibly helpful and beneficial.

You're replying to a person who had a similar and even more helpful and beneficial experience because they're alive today.

Pedantically pointing out that a beneficial and helpful thing isn't 100% beneficial and helpful 100% of the time doesn't add anything useful to the conversation since everyone here already knows it's not 100%.

fukka422• 9 months ago

Any reason you didn't just call your GP or even 911?

hombre_fatal• 9 months ago

Denial, or rather some form of "there's no way this is frickin stroke/heart attack, right?", is common when you're having a medical emergency.

jjulius• 9 months ago

LLMs are incredibly beneficial...

No, they can be. To state that they are, as an absolute, based on your sample size of one, especially with regard to other instances where ChatGPT has failed the user with serious physical results, is fallacious.

I am glad that you are OK, but as another user suggested, it's nowhere near as consistently accurate as it needs to be in order to be anywhere near an adequate substitute for a call to a GP or 911.

wseqyrku• 9 months ago

Does this mean you could file a request for any job to not eradicate?

outside1234• 9 months ago

Is this just for ChatGPT or for the GPT models in general?

shevy-java• 9 months ago

That's ok - I give medical advice all the time so just ask me!

"If it hurts when putting it in, don't put it in."

I mean, that might come close to ChatGTP in quality, right?

mk894• 9 months ago

I was wondering when they would start with the regulations.

Next will be: you're allowed to use it, if your company/product is "HippocraticGPT"-certified, a bit like SOC or PCI compliance.

This way they can craft an instance of GPT for your specific purposes (law, medicine, etc) and you know it's "safe" to use.

This way they sell EE licenses, which is where the big $$$ are.

liampulles3• 9 months ago

I think this would apply if they sought out government regulation that applies to all AI players, not just their own company.

mk894• 9 months ago

...or they want to be the first to do it, as others don't have it.

OpenAI is the leading company, if they provide an instance you can use for legal advice, with relative certification etc., it'd be better to trust them rather than another random player. They create the software, the certification and the need for it.

gblargg3• 9 months ago

Or you'll need a prescription to be able to ask it health questions.

dotancohen8• 9 months ago

  > Next will be: you're allowed to use it, if your company/product is "HippocraticGPT"-certified, a bit like SOC or PCI compliance.

That's exactly how it should be. That's why one needs a license to practice medicine.

I work with a company in this space. All the AI tools are for the professional to use - the patient never interacts with them. The inferred output (I prefer the word prediction) is only ever seen by a mental health professional.

We reduce the professionals' workloads and help them be more efficient. But it's _not_ better care. That absolutely must be stressed. It is more _efficient_ care for the mental health practitioner and for society that can not produce enough mental health practitioners.

liampulles3• 9 months ago

What is the value of the certification on the AI output? If OpenAI says they'll get guarantee the output and be accountable for errors, then thats of value, and would justify the certification. Is that the bar?

stalfie• 9 months ago

Im working on a PhD concerning LLMs and somatic medicine, as an MD, and I must admit that my perspective is the complete opposite.

Medical care, at the end of the day, has nothing to do with having a license or not. Its about making the correct diagnosis, in order to administer the correct treatment. Reality does not care about who (or what) made a diagnosis, or how the antibiotic you take was prescribed. You either have the diagnosis, or you do not. The antibiotic helps, or it does not.

Doing this in practice is costly and complicated, which is why society has doctors. But the only thing that actually matters is making the correct decision. And actually, when you test LLMs (in particular o3/gpt-5 and probably gemini 2.5), they are SUPERIOR to individual doctors in terms of medical decisionmaking, at least on benchmarks. That does not mean that they are superior to an entire medical system, or a skillfull attending in a particular speciality, but it does seem imply that they are far from a bad source of medical information. Just like LLMs are good at writing boilerplate code, they are good at boilerplate medical decisions, and the fact is that there is so much medical boilerplate that this skill alone makes it superior to most human doctors. There was one study which tested LLM assisted (I think it was o3) doctors VS LLMs alone (+doctors alone) on a set of cases, and the unassisted LLM did BETTER than doctors, assisted or not.

And so all this medicolegal pearlclutching about how LLMs should not provide medical advice is entirely unfounded when you look at the actual evidence. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that you should ignore the doctor and listen to chatGPT instead.

And frankly, as a doctor, it really grinds my gears when anyone implies that medical decisions should be a protected domain to our benefit. The point of medicine is not to employ doctors. The point of medicine is to cure patients, by whatever means best serves them. If LLMs take our jobs, because they do a better job than we do, that is a good thing. It is an especially good thing if the general, widely available LLM is the one that does so, and not the expensively licensed "HippocraticGPT-certified" model. Can you imagine anything more frustrating, as a poor kid in the boonies of Bangladesh trying to understand why your mother is sick, than getting told "As a language model I cannot dispense medical advice, please consult your closest healthcare professional".

Medical success is not measured in employment, profits, or legal responsibilities. It is measured in reduced mortality. The means to achieve this is completely irrelevant.

Of course, mental health is a little bit different, and much more nebulous overall. However, from the perspective of someone on the somatic front, overregulation of LLMs is unecessary, and in fact unethical. On average, an LLM will dispense better medical advice than an average person with access to google, which is what it was competing with to begin with. It is an insult to personal liberty and to the Hippocratic oath to support that this should be taken away simply because of some medicolegal bs.

asgerhb• 9 months ago

"This technology will radically transform the way our world works and soon replace all knowledge-based jobs. Do not trust anything it says: Entertainment purposes only."

captainkrtek• 9 months ago

I feel like this sums up the AI problem at large. The marketing and hype from every tech company is that its game changing, but more softly spoken is “hey dont trust it for anything important” as a CYA disclaimer. The problem is the masses only hear the part said in bold.

In bold: This technology will radically transform the way our world works and soon replace all knowledge-based jobs.

In fine print: Do not trust anything it says: Entertainment purposes only

uyzstvqs• 9 months ago

Grok will do mostly whatever you want. It's a tool and it's your personal responsibility to use it correctly. That's the way it should be. You don't need Sam Altman to babysit you, I hope.

sangeeth96• 9 months ago

It's a tool and it's your personal responsibility to use it correctly.

Sure in theory, but this never works out in practice when applied to the populace. Replace "LLM" with other controversial things — social media, cigarettes, guns.

I'm also certain anyone outside the tech sphere who takes personal responsibility when using LLMs is not using Grok as their daily driver.

nake89• 9 months ago

Grok Code Fast 1 is quite usable for small simple coding tasks. And quite a bit cheaper than say: Claude Sonnet 4.5

Personal experience when using it OpenRouter.

That said, I prefer bigger models even if they cost more. But I do this through GitHub Copilot at a steady 10 dollars per month. I can do way more request with it than I can with 10 dollars worth of credits at OpenRouter. I don't think Copilot is making any money, on the contrary.

mschuster91• 9 months ago

As long as Elon keeps messing with Grok because the facts it uses aren't compatible with his world view [1], I'll stay away from it as far as possible.

And even leaving the political questions aside - the thing is being molded into a goon generator [2], just WTF.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/27/tech/grok-4-elon-musk-ai

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/09/grok-system-p...

rapish62• 9 months ago

Thats Great!

entropi2• 9 months ago

Hmm. So OpenAI doesn't care about other people's terms, copyrights or any sort of IP; but they get to have their own terms.

exasperaited• 9 months ago

Controlling other people's things and gaining from the control is kind of the point of being a thief.

sfn425• 9 months ago

I don't understand this outrage. People put things on the internet for all to see but now you're mad someone saw it and made use of it.

If you didn't want others to read your information you shouldn't have published it on the internet. That's all they're doing at the end of the day, reading it. They're not publishing it as their own, they just used publicly available data to train a model.

It's quite the same as if I read an article and then tell someone about it. If I'm allowed to learn from your article then why isn't openai?

Also the terms are just for liability. Nobody gives a shit what you use ChatGPT for, the only thing those terms do is prevent you from turning around and suing OpenAI after it blows up in your face.

entropi2• 9 months ago

And I feel like the difference between, say;

- Paying for a ticket/dvd/stream to see a Ghibli movie

- Training a model on their work without compensating them, then enabling everyone to copy their art style with ~zero effort, flooding the market and diluting the value of their work. And making money in the process.

should be rather obvious. My only hypothesis so far is that a lot of the people in here have a vested interest in not understanding the outrage, so they don't.

snoman3• 9 months ago

Quite the over-simplified straw man you have there.

freejazz8• 9 months ago

You ever see warning labels on products? That's because putting them in terms and conditions isn't enough to avoid liability in a products liability case.

Etherlord87• 9 months ago

People publish stuff on the Internet for various reasons. Sometimes they want to share information, but if the information is shared, they want to be *attributed* as the authors.

If you didn't want others to read your information you shouldn't have published it on the internet. That's all they're doing at the end of the day, reading it. They're not publishing it as their own, they just used publicly available data to train a model.

There is some nuance here that you fail to notice or you pretend you don't see it :D I can't copy-paste a computer program and resell it without a license. I can't say "Oh I've just read the bits, learned from it and based on this knowledge I created my own computer program that looks exactly the same except the author name is different in the »About...« section" - clearly, some reason has to be used to differentiate reading-learning-creating from simply copying...

What if instead of copy-pasting the digital code, you print it onto a film, pass the light through the film onto ants, make the light kill the ants exposed, and the rest of the ants eventually go away, and now use the dead ants as another film to somehow convert that back to digital data. You can now argue you didn't copy, you taught ants, the ants learned, and they created a new program. But you will fool no one. AI models don't actually learn, they are a different way the data is stored. I think when court decides if a use is fair and transformative enough, it investigates how much effort was put into this transformation: there was a lot of effort put into creating the AI, but once it was created, the effort put into any single work is nearly null, just the electricity, bandwidth, storage.

sabatonfan5• 9 months ago

Welcome to the internet! Have a look around

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU)

Another obligatory song named Jeff bezos by Bo Burnham (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI5w2QwdYik)

C'mon Jeffrey you can do it! (I mean you can break half the internet with AWS us-east-1, but in all seriousness both songs are really nice lol)

zombot• 9 months ago

That's almost too reasonable to be credible. They are probably just covering their ass until they can do it with impunity. With the rapidly progressing corruption of the legal system it's merely a question of time until companies doing it for profit can disseminate medical and legal bullshit all they want. Politicians are already doing it.

ungerik• 9 months ago

So only they can give direct legal and medical advice, which is still illegal in most countries. It's not a promoted service yet, but everyone is using it to ask such questions.

SwtCyber3• 9 months ago

This feels like OpenAI tightening the language to catch up with how people are actually using ChatGPT, not a policy shift so much as a reality check

realitydrift• 9 months ago

The real issue isn’t the policy change, it’s that AI has gotten better at sounding credible than at staying grounded. That creates a kind of performativity drift where the tone of expertise scales faster than the underlying accuracy.

So even when the model is wrong, it’s wrong with perfect bedside manner, and people anchor on that. In high stakes domains like medicine or law, that gap between confidence and fidelity becomes the actual risk, not the tool itself.

fluorinerocket• 9 months ago

Lawyers and doctors act to protect their profession and prevent getting replaced by an AI.

insane_dreamer• 9 months ago

Not sure about legal advice but if GPT provides medical advice it risks being classified as a medical device (requiring FDA approval).

ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others

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