In January 2026, OpenAI released ChatGPT Health. According to OpenAI, the need for this new AI product is apparent from the high number of health queries submitted to ChatGPT. People disappointed by the quality and cost of human medical advice are already soliciting free second opinions from Dr AI. ChatGPT Health promises something better: “a dedicated experience that securely brings your health information and ChatGPT’s intelligence together, to help you feel more informed, prepared, and confident navigating your health”.
As with any big change, there are jousting anecdotes. We’ve read of a man who became delusional after being told by ChatGPT that sodium bromide was a safe substitute for table salt, sodium chloride. We’ve also seen Reddit discussions of AIs proposing accurate diagnoses after years of fruitless and expensive medical appointments. It should be no surprise that doctors, those with the strongest professional commitment to health, are divided about the OpenAI product being marketed as “Health”.
What does OpenAI want?
I want to shift focus here from the hopes and fears of individual doctors and patients to the plans of OpenAI itself. What does it want? To see this, we should temporarily shelve promises of superintelligent oncology AIs together with dreams about colonies on Mars. OpenAI has a more immediate need. Without proof of profit commensurate with investors’ multibillion-dollar expectations, how does it avoid becoming prey for Google, Nvidia or some other AI economy shark?
From the perspective of shareholder value, ChatGPT Health could be a massive advance over essays on Shakespeare gifted to students for free. The corporation that wins in AI medicine could claim a share of the more than ten per cent of global GDP spent on health.
I would therefore urge defenders of human medicine done by humans to look past Dr AI’s immediate annoyances and see the bigger picture. That’s OpenAI’s focus. It views doctors’ objections much in the way Uber viewed the protests of traditional taxi businesses and unions. Their complaints were obstacles to be politically and legally managed rather than listened to. Those seeking a better healthcare system should be equally single-minded in pursuit of a future in which humans use high-tech tools to treat and care for other humans.
Reflexively defending a patently unjust medical status quo only empowers OpenAI to do to doctors exactly as digital innovators have always done to traditional economy opponents.
Seek advice from workers already disrupted by AI
We are told that AI is coming for all lines of work. But some workers have felt the effects of AI earlier than others. I’m a humanities professor grappling with an avalanche of AI-written Plato essays. ChatGPT Health looks to me like the next unwanted incursion of AI into domains properly reserved for humans. OpenAI says it wants to help doctors and has no plans to usurp them. But that’s what it said to me too. Its manner of “assistance” brought the impossible challenge of determining which essays on Immanuel Kant were written by students and which by AI. Thanks!
We need change in healthcare just as we need change in the academy. Committees of doctors predictably offer a variety of views about AI medicine. The resulting institutional inertia leaves a failing system in place — the perfect opening for businesses marketing a new AI medical experience.
Doctors speak dismissively about patients who spend much of their allocated fifteen minutes pestering them about Dr Google’s recommendations. To those patients, ChatGPT Health looks like a radical upgrade of Dr Google. Rather than focusing exclusively on Dr AI’s errors, look to the failings of the system that motivate patients to request differential diagnoses from a machine. AIs make mistakes, but so do humans. At least ChatGPT’s advice is currently free.
To beat the AI experience, reinvent the human experience
It is a mistake to contest OpenAI’s vision of the future of medicine with mere nostalgia. We miss what we remember about family doctors because we choose to forget their failings. We should expect the first medical AI services to be replaced by more efficient medical tech, not by handloom-operating family doctors with 1970s hairstyles.
Better to look to the future and AI’s many possibilities. The Canadian tech writer Cory Doctorow describes the process of “enshittification”. This is one possibility for Dr AI. Amazon, Meta and other enshittifiers start by offering customers amazing deals. Once incumbents are defeated, prices increase in the service of shareholder value. There are many ways in which AI medicine could be enshittified after driving out today’s overcharging medical businesses. Will poorer patients pay for AI consults by consenting to spam selling products linked with their illnesses?
Want the best of Religion & Ethics delivered to your mailbox?
Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
It is difficult to reverse any technological change successfully marketed as progress. This means that those who want a future in which humans treat and care for humans must act with a boldness of vision that matches OpenAI’s pursuit of profit. If we delay, a future in which humans care for humans could rapidly seem as absurd as proposals to place the handloom at the centre of Australia’s textile industry.
The immediate effects of the Chicxulub meteor that ended the dinosaurs were bad for most living creatures. But it did liberate the mammals from oppression by T-rex and its ilk. ChatGPT Health will reveal a variety of possible futures beyond those favoured by OpenAI’s investors. In many of these, caring for other humans won’t be governed by the need to subdivide treatment into maximally billable fifteen-minute units. There are so many ways in which AI-equipped doctors could treat what ails us, as they make clear that they care more about us than about our money.
Nicholas Agar is Professor of Ethics at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of How to be Human in the Digital Economy and Dialogues on Human Enhancement, and co-author (with Stuart Whatley and Dan Weijers) of How to Think about Progress: A Skeptic’s Guide to Technology.
Posted , updated
link
