alt Hacker NewsThis almost certainly isn't only a China problem. I've observed UK users asking questions about diabetes and other health advice. We also have an inexpensive (free-at-point of use for most stuff) but stretched healthcare system. Doubtless there are US users looking at the cost of their healthcare and resorting to ChatGPT instead too.
In companies people talk about Shadow-IT happening when IT doesn't cover the user needs. We should probably label this stuff Shadow-Health.
To some extent, the deployment of a publicly funded AI health chat bot, where the responses can be analysed by healthcare professionals to at least prevent future harm is probably significantly less bad than telling people not to ask AI questions and consult the existing stretched infrastructure. Because people will ask the questions regardless.
The joke of looking symptoms up on WebMD and determining you have cancer has been around for... geez over 20 years now. Anti-vaccine sentiment mostly derived from Facebook. Google any symptom today and there are about 10 million Quora-esque websites of "doctors" answering questions. I'm not sure that funneling all of this into the singular UI of an AI interface is really better or worse or even all that different.
But I do agree that some focused and well funded public health bot would be ideal, although we'll need the WHO to do it, it's certainly not coming from the US any time soon.