AI in primary care: secretary, not physician

A recent article in Nature Medicine will come as a relief to GPs worried about their employment prospects: AI chatbots are not ready to replace doctors.The authors presented case vignettes summarising common medical conditions to members of the public, randomly assigning them to interact with large language model (LLM) chatbots or to use whatever resources they would normally consult at home.The results were striking.Users of LLMs were less likely than the control group to identify relevant medical conditions underlying the scenario.When it came to choosing the correct level of care, LLM users performed no better than those using conventional methods.But was the AI itself to blame?