Can I trust health advice from an AI chatbot?

For the past year, Abi has been using ChatGPT – one of the best known AI chatbots – to help manage her health.

The appeal is clear. It can feel impossible to get hold of a GP and artificial intelligence is always ready to answer your questions. And AI has comfortably passed some medical exams.

So should we trust the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok? Is using them any different to an old-fashioned internet search? Or, as some experts fear – are chatbots getting things dangerously wrong, putting lives on the line?

Abi, who is from Manchester, struggles with health anxiety and finds a chatbot gives more tailored advice than an internet search, which will often take her straight to the scariest possibilities.

"It allows a kind of problem solving together," she says. "A little bit like chatting with your doctor."