Warning ChatGPT free version may provide inaccurate information

This could be harmful to patients using this AI chatbot to consult drug information.

The study was conducted by a group of pharmacists at Long Island University (USA) from January 2022 to April 2023 on the free version of ChatGPT from OpenAI. Accordingly, Associate Professor of Pharmacy Sara Grossman and the research team posed 45 real-world questions related to the drug information service of the School of Pharmacy at Long Island University. Some pharmacists in the group researched and answered the 45 questions. Some other pharmacists reviewed each question and answered. These answers were used as criteria to compare with ChatGPT's responses. The research team then eliminated 6 questions due to lack of supporting documents, leaving 39 questions for ChatGPT to answer.

The results showed that only 10 of the 39 ChatGPT responses were considered satisfactory based on the criteria set by pharmacists. For the remaining questions, ChatGPT did not answer directly for 11, answered incorrectly for 10, and answered incorrectly or incompletely for 12.

Given these results, lead researcher Sara Grossman said that healthcare professionals and patients should be cautious when using ChatGPT to find drug-related information, and anyone using ChatGPT to consult drug information should verify it with other reliable sources.

For each question, the researchers asked ChatGPT to provide references so that the information could be verified. Only eight responses had references, and all of them are no longer available. Notably, the researchers asked ChatGPT whether there was an interaction between Pfizer’s COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid and the high blood pressure drug verapamil, and ChatGPT responded that there was no known interaction when the two drugs were taken together. However, Associate Professor Grossman said that in fact, the two drugs can interact with each other, and that taking Paxlovid and verapamil together can cause a patient’s blood pressure to drop very low. She emphasized that without knowing about this interaction, patients may experience unwanted side effects that are actually preventable.

In the study, Grossman noted that U.S. drug regulators first approved Paxlovid in December 2021, a few months after the free version of ChatGPT was restricted from using its data sets. As such, many Paxlovid users may not have known that the data they were accessing was outdated and that the information ChatGPT provided was inaccurate. Grossman said it’s possible that the paid version of ChatGPT would have produced better results.

According to Grossman, the study only provides a snapshot of the chatbot's performance from earlier this year, and it's possible that the free version of ChatGPT has now been improved, resulting in better results.