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In some contexts, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can communicate as well as or even better than humans. If medicine proves to be one of them, the technology might help with some routine physician duties, like responding to patients' emails and texts. Researchers selected about 200 anonymous medical questions posted by members of the public in 2022 to a Reddit forum, r/AskDocs, which were answered online by anonymous volunteer physicians with verified credentials. The same questions were then posed verbatim to ChatGPT. A team of physicians compared the responses in a blinded fashion.
Overall, the evaluators preferred the chatbot responses almost 80% of the time. The chatbot's responses were longer (mean, 180 vs. 52 words) and ranked hi…