Chatbots reduce health-related conspiracy beliefs not because of but despite being perceived as AI - Nature

“How are you doing?” “Are you sleeping well?” “Do you drink?” These are typical opening questions a mental-health professional might ask a patient. Soon, another question may be added to the list: “How do you use artificial intelligence (AI)?”

As more and more people turn to AI chatbots for quick, 24/7 medical advice, a new perspective paper co-authored by faculty at Binghamton University explores the risks this practice carries that are largely invisible to users – and healthcare systems. The paper, written by researchers at Binghamton University, Stanford University, Texas A&M University, and Indiana University, and published in Nature Health, examines what happens when a chatbot gives someone bad health advice. The authors argue that the harm is hard to catch because the conversation stays on the AI company's platform, the person has no place to report the problem, and outside researchers cannot measure the damage. “We’re getting medical advice from these chatbots, but nobody—literally no one—is looking at this. If there’s an error or an issue, there’s just no way for people to know,” said Kaicheng Yang, an assistant professor in the School of Computing at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science and one of the paper’s authors. The researchers gave the example of a 60-year-old man who asked ChatGPT how to cut chloride from his diet and swapped table salt with sodium bromide.

Bioengineer.org news storyFor millions of people living with HIV, antiretroviral therapy has transformed a once-fatal infection into a manageable chronic condition. Yet the very drugs that suppress the virus can carry quiet costs, and one of the most insidious is bone loss. Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, or TDF, has been a cornerstone of HIV treatment worldwide for two decades, prized for its potency, durability, and low cost. But a growing body of evidence has linked TDF exposure to measurable reductions in bone mineral density, raising an increasingly urgent clinical question: once bone has been lost on a TDF-based regimen, can it be recovered? A new prospective cohort study, published in BMC Infectious Diseases, offers some of the most detailed longitudinal evidence to date that the answer, for many patients, is yes. The research team enrolled 223 virologically suppressed men living with HIV who had low bone mineral density while taking TDF-based antiretroviral therapy.