Putting ChatGPT's Medical Advice to the (turing) Test

Objective: Assess the feasibility of using ChatGPT or a similar AI-based chatbot for patient-provider communication. Participants: A US representative sample of 430 study participants aged 18 and above. 53.2 analyzed were women; their average age was 47.1. Exposure: Ten representative non-administrative patient-provider interactions were extracted from the EHR. Patients' questions were placed in ChatGPT with a request for the chatbot to respond using approximately the same word count as the human provider's response. In the survey, each patient's question was followed by a provider- or ChatGPT-generated response. Participants were informed that five responses were provider-generated and five were chatbot-generated. Participants were asked, and incentivized financially, to correctly identify the response source. Participants were also asked about their trust in chatbots' functions in patient-provider communication, using a Likert scale of 1-5. Results: The correct classification of responses ranged between 49.0 questions. On average, chatbot responses were correctly identified 65.5 time, and provider responses were correctly distinguished 65.1 average, responses toward patients' trust in chatbots' functions were weakly positive (mean Likert score: 3.4), with lower trust as the health-related complexity of the task in questions increased. Conclusions: ChatGPT responses to patient questions were weakly distinguishable from provider responses. Laypeople appear to trust the use of chatbots to answer lower risk health questions.