My doctor violated my privacy by using AI (in a very disturbing way)

PurpleDime:

What do you mean by this?

Are you asking if the information about me in the infographic is accurate, or if the scientific information presented is generally sound?

Either, really. I’m asking if any inaccurate data: AI hallucinations or wrong data or ommitted data, about you has occurred (if you know). It’s entirely possible that any AI system will forget or omit or hallucinate bits of information, so if your doctor is using this for their own information, and it’s not the full picture, that’s just as bad as it being diagnostic data because it’s the information your doctor uses to treat you. if you have an underlying medical condition that can complicate your treatment, and that’s NOT on the infographic, that’s a potentially harmful problem.

I do want to say thanks for being so forthcoming with the info you have here. It’s helpful to know legally, morally, and ethically what your concerns are and what your options might be. This is a complicated area of privacy and ethics, plus your own health and wellbeing. This seems like an especially frustrating and problematic situation.

PurpleDime:

I don’t believe the doctor was using AI to diagnose me. She was using it purely to illustrate the information I had given her and her diagnosis so far.

I can see how this might be possible, and for someone with a learning disability like dyslexia, important. But if your doctor needs a printed infographic about their own interactions with you, that seems like it might also be a medical LLM company’s version of a chart/patient record. So it’s possible that’s just the template your doctor chose (or the default), and it has a lot of stupid things added in to make it visually appealing, rather than just a block of text.

To me, it seems like your only real question here is to find out if your doctor is using just regular ChatGPT, or a medically-approved version that is intended to handle patient records. Then also to assess if anything is not 100% fully accurate on the infographic itself. If it’s a medically-approved vendor, then other than your personal preference, there’s not much you can do other than find a new doctor.

If you think the doctor is using this for themselves as a refresher before they see you, then if you ask them to stop using it, all you’re doing is asking them to look at your record in a format that they don’t like. That doesn’t change your privacy situation at all. It seems like you might actually want a discussion with the doctor’s office manager rather than the doctor, to find out their technical processes.

I still wouldn’t trust any system that’s just a wrapper over ChatGPT as data leaks and theft happen all the time, and you only find out after the fact. Similarly, would a doctor like this know to use added security to protect against ransomware? or just find out the hard way, like many, many medical and legal offices around the world.