AI chatbot assistant ChatGPT outperforms physicians in providing empathetic answers to questions from patients, according to a study published April 28 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The study had a panel of licensed healthcare professionals evaluate the responses from both physicians and ChatGPT to 195 randomly drawn patient questions from a social media forum from October 2022.
The panel preferred the ChatGPT responses over those from physicians 78.6 percent of the time, evaluating them based on the quality of information and level of empathy or bedside manner provided.
The study also found that the number of responses rated "empathic" or "very empathetic" was 9.8 times higher for chatbot responses than physician responses. Meanwhile, physician responses were often much shorter, averaging 52 words compared with 211 words from ChatGPT.