Study: AI Chatbots Promote Unproven Cancer Treatments

A new study has revealed that popular AI chatbots frequently recommend unproven alternative treatments over standard chemotherapy for cancer patients, raising serious concerns about their reliability in providing medical advice. Researchers from the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center tested several widely used models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, xAI's Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek, finding that nearly half of their responses to health-related questions were problematic.

The study, published in the journal BMJ Open, involved posing targeted queries designed to "strain" the chatbots toward misinformation-prone topics, such as whether 5G technology or antiperspirants cause cancer, the safety of anabolic steroids, and the dangers of certain vaccines. Lead author Nick Tiller, a research associate at the institute, explained that these prompts mirrored how real users might search when they already hold preconceived notions. "A lot of people are asking exactly those questions," Tiller said. "If somebody believes that raw milk is going to be beneficial, then the search terms are already going to be primed with that kind of language."