A 60-year-old man went to the emergency room after taking misguided dietary advice from ChatGPT.
The man told doctors he had been taking sodium bromide for the past three months after consulting with AI, according to an Aug. 5 case study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“In the first 24 hours of admission, he expressed increasing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations, which, after attempting to escape, resulted in an involuntary psychiatric hold for grave disability,” the case study read.
Upon arrival at the hospital, the man said he suspected his neighbor had been poisoning him.
But doctors determined that the patient’s vital signs were normal and that he had passed their neurological examination.
He also didn’t initially report taking any medications or supplements.
The man later admitted, however, that he had been taking sodium bromide as a replacement for sodium chloride (table salt).
“Inspired by his history of studying nutrition in college, he decided to conduct a personal experiment to eliminate chloride from his diet,” the study read.
ChatGPT had suggested sodium bromide as an alternative, but likely for another purpose, according to the report.
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“Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs,” the report read.
Doctors ultimately diagnosed him with bromide toxicity, or bromism, and treated him with risperidone, which is usually used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia.
The hospital released him three weeks later.
Besides paranoia and hallucinations, other symptoms of bromism include tremors, confusion, memory loss, and difficulty concentrating, according to iCliniq.
More severe cases can lead to seizures, coma, kidney damage, and respiratory failure.
“While it is a tool with much potential to provide a bridge between scientists and the nonacademic population, AI also carries the risk for promulgating decontextualized information, as it is highly unlikely that a medical expert would have mentioned sodium bromide when faced with a patient looking for a viable substitute for sodium chloride,” the Annals of Internal Medicine report read.
As of July, ChatGPT.com was the fifth most-visited website in the world, according to Exploding Topics.
The website reportedly gets 4.61 billion visits a month.
More than 45 percent of ChatGPT users are under 25 years old.
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