Why this Virginia Tech professor says don't use AI for medical advice

New forms of technology and privacy concerns surrounding them are nothing new. France Bélanger's time researching new developments and their impacts dates back to the dawn of the internet. Social media followed, as did Siri, Amazon Echo and Google Home. Most recently, chatbots using artificial intelligence — such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and Microsoft's Copilot — have risen to prominence, informing Bélanger's research with it. Bélanger is a university distinguished professor at Virginia Tech, a role in which she has worked since 2021 at a school that has employed her since 1997. She has a doctorate of philosophy in information systems and decision sciences from the University of South Florida. Recently, her research has focused on the ethics surrounding chatbots and why people continue to enter information into them. 'For the last 20 years, I've been researching mostly security and privacy — and trust comes up as an aside, because trust is a bigger concept,' Bélanger said. 'So, I've been following all of the evolutions of technology and what people do from a privacy standpoint, from a data protection standpoint.' Regulatory systems exist to protect medical privacy, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which ensures patients' rights and protects their medical information. HIPAA applies to medical organizations and healthcare professionals. However, when people enter their medical information into chatbots, they are not receiving the same security. 'The data that you put into ChatGPT, just because it's medical information, that doesn't mean it's protected,' Bélanger said. Chatbots are not human A recent KFF poll showed that about 32% of U.S. adults have used AI chatbots for health information in the last year. Bélanger said people who use chatbots find benefits in them; they're conversational, they speak the user's language and they can digest a lot of information fast. However, she noted, people can fail to realize that those chatbots are not human. Using the internet to seek medical advice — facetiously known as 'Dr. Google' — has been prominent since the technology became mainstream. Social media has made everyone's lives more public, too. 'People — ever since social media became so big — have gotten used to providing information without thinking twice about it,' Bélanger said. 'That's the biggest problem in the world that I'm trying to solve.' However, these chatbots differ from social media and other technological predecessors. 'AI can process so much, so quickly,' Bélanger said. 'If you think of social media, which is a great example to compare to, social media became a place for people to gather information, but a lot of it is user-generated content. So, people put in information and they create interactions with each other. The advance of the AI tools that we have today make gathering information fast, but from such a vast amount of data out there.' Bélanger was quick to clarify that she is not opposed to using AI. However, people who use it, she said, should keep in mind that they are not speaking with a human. 'I think it's great for gathering information, but the AI is not a doctor,' Bélanger said. 'If the AI says 'I'm sorry to hear' or 'I feel for your problem' — it's not true. But if you use it as an information tool, then that's a great tool.' © 2026 The Roanoke Times, Va.. Visit www.roanoke.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.