OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage for medical and legal advice

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”?

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.

> brainstorming what to ask your doctor

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

I don’t want to be a doctor, I just want to fix what ails me. You don’t need an MD to research symptoms.

The bad idea is to live and die in ignorance. The good idea is to use GPT to find ideas and references that one can then verify. If it were up to the medical establishment, they would block the public from accessing medical research altogether, and they already do this by paywalling much research.

GPT saved me yesterday. It helped me identify and verify a rare three-way undocumented medicine interaction that was causing anguish. The interaction was hypomagnesia and serious arrhythmia caused by a combination of berberine, famotidine, and vonoprazan. This was despite magnesium supplementation.

Two months ago it helped me accurately identify a gastrointestinal diverticulitis-type issue, find the right medication for it (metronidazole), which fixed the issue for good. It also guided me on identifying the cause, and also on pausing and restoring fiber intake appropriately.

Granted, it is very easy for people to make serious mistakes in using LLMs, but granted how many mistakes doctors make, it is better to take some self-responsibility first. The road to making a useful diagnosis can be windy, but with sufficient exploration, GPT will get you there.