ChatGPT May Be Better At Diagnosing Depression Than Doctors: Study

Amid concerns of artificial intelligence (AI) impacting jobs and replacing humans, a new study says that chatbot ChatGPT may be better at following recognised treatment standards for clinical depression than doctors. The study’s findings were published in the open access journal owned by British Medical Journal, Family Medicine and Community Health.

According to the researchers from the UK and Israel, OpenAI’s ChatGPT apparently has the potential to offer fast, data-derived and objective insights that can supplement traditional diagnostic methods as well as provide confidentiality and anonymity.

The findings in the study said that the proposals of ChatGPT are in line with the accepted guidelines for mild and severe depression treatment.

“ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 aligned well with accepted guidelines for managing mild and severe depression, without showing the gender or socioeconomic biases observed among primary care physicians,” they said.

The researchers also highlighted unlike the treatments proposed by primary care physicians, ChatGPT’s therapeutic recommendations are not biased towards a gender or is full of social class biases.

They further highlighted that primary care physicians may have trouble conforming to the guidelines by which they are able to distinguish between typical distress and bona fide depressive or anxiety disorders. In order to test the ChatGPT’s capabilities, the researchers input different case descriptions into the chatbot’s interface.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, the creator of AI chatbot ChatGPT, is likely to generate over $1 billion in revenue in the next 12 months, a report said last month.

The Microsoft-backed company is on track to create this revenue via selling AI software and computing capacity that powers it. Besides the viral chatbot ChatGPT, the company makes money by selling API access to its AI models for developers and enterprises directly and through a partnership with Microsoft, which invested over $10 billion into the company in January.