Chris Spyrou

30% of us have acted on what it said, while 35% of us have used it to get a second opinion on our doctor's advice.

It's been dubbed the shadow doctor, an unregulated consultation room that's open around the clock, and it's only getting bigger.

OpenAI joined the race this year with the launch of ChatGPT Health.

And while that's not available in Australia just yet, it's just one of several platforms that let users sync everything from their medical records, lab results, and even smartwatch data into one centralized AI brain that not only holds everything, but responds to you in plain English.

And according to these companies, they're in the business of creating tools that support, not replace, clinical care.

And because of that, they sit in a massive regulatory grey zone here in Australia.

They're marketed as wellness assistants, not clinical tools.

So they fall just outside TGA regulations, meaning they can analyse your most intimate health data without ever having to prove they're accurate or even safe.

So the question we'll be digging into in this deep dive isn't if we're turning to AI for our healthcare and the dangers of it, but why and how we're doing it.

Poppy Reid is a journalist who's been on the AI health train for a little while, and she joins me now.

Poppy, welcome to the briefing.

Most of us listening, we're no stranger to Dr. Google.

Were you a Dr. Googler before you became a Dr. AI-er?

What was it that pushed you to make that first search?

I mean, a lot of us, our first foray into AI land would be ChatGPT to help us draft an email.

But you sought it for medical advice or at least medical help.

Talk me through that.

I want to know, you know, at least in the example you just gave, it's quite a general condition or it's a general thing most people would have experienced.

Have you ever used AI to try to interrogate or find something a bit more niche or specialist or a bit more tricky in the medical world?

So it sounds like you're almost tapping into that journalism and the curiosity of it all and kind of using it to further understand a condition as opposed to getting yourself diagnosed on these platforms.