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ChatGPT appears to have a better ‘bedside manner’ than some doctors – at least when their written advice is rated for quality and empathy, a study has shown.

The findings highlight the potential for AI assistants to play a role in medicine, according to the authors of the work, who suggest such agents could help draft doctors’ communications with patients. “The opportunities for improving healthcare with AI are massive,” said Dr John Ayers, of the University of California San Diego.

However, others noted that the findings do not mean ChatGPT is actually a better doctor and cautioned against delegating clinical responsibility given that the chatbot has a tendency to produce “facts” that are untrue.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, used data from Reddit’s AskDocs forum, in which members can post medical questions that are answered by verified healthcare professionals. The team randomly sampled 195 exchanges from AskDocs where a verified doctor responded to a public question. The original questions were then posed to the AI language model, ChatGPT, which was asked to respond. A panel of three licensed healthcare professionals, who did not know whether the response came from a human physician or ChatGPT, rated the answers for quality and empathy.

Overall, the panel preferred ChatGPT’s responses to those given by a human 79% of the time. ChatGPT responses were also rated good or very good quality 79% of the time, compared with 22% of doctors’ responses, and 45% of the ChatGPT answers were rated empathic or very empathic compared with just 5% of doctors’ replies.

Dr Christopher Longhurst, of UC San Diego Health, said: “These results suggest that tools like ChatGPT can efficiently draft high-quality, personalised medical advice for review by clinicians, and we are beginning that process at UCSD Health.”

Prof James Davenport, of the University of Bath, who was not involved in the research, said: “The paper does not say that ChatGPT can replace doctors, but does, quite legitimately, call for further research into whether and how ChatGPT can assist physicians in response generation.”

Some noted that, given ChatGPT was specifically optimised to be likable, it was not surprising that it wrote text that came across as empathic. It also tended to give longer, chattier answers than human doctors, which could have played a role in its higher ratings.

Others cautioned against relying on language models for factual information due to their tendency to generate made-up “facts”.Prof Anthony Cohn, of the University of Leeds, said that using language models as a tool to draft responses was a “reasonable use case for early adoption”, but that even in a supporting role they should be used carefully. “Humans have been shown to overly trust machine responses, particularly when they are often right, and a human may not always be sufficiently vigilant to properly check a chatbot’s response,” he said. “This would need guarding against, perhaps using random synthetic wrong responses to test vigilance.”

A group of scientists from the University of California (USA) think that aliens can contact us in 2029.

In 2002, NASA sent transmission waves to the Pioneer 12 probe, in a routine data transmission protocol, to ensure that possible communication with extraterrestrial beings was established.

The signal has also reached a star 27 light years away from our planet. Now, American scientists hope that the signal could be intercepted by extraterrestrials.

“The waves will reach 222 stars by 2313. But we expect a return of transmission as early as 2029,” reads the report of the University of California researchers.

However, despite no sign of extraterrestrials, scientists say they will not give up and will soon send more signals into space to see if there is a possible reaction.

Technology can help people a lot in education and provide them with a lot of information and different ways of learning, but according to Bill Gates, ChatGPT can teach children to read and write.

This should not be expected in the distant future, but AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbots may have that capability in about a year and a half.Gates spoke about this at last week’s conference in San Diego and highlighted how artificial intelligence will be on par with the best teachers in terms of its educational capabilities. Today’s chatbots already show, as Gates called it, “remarkable skills in understanding and writing,” and it’s clear that they’ll get better at transferring knowledge over time.

In addition to helping children with reading and writing, it will also help students, who can enhance and improve their writing and reading skills thanks to this technology. Many are already using chatbots when drafting essays, emails, job applications and newspaper articles.

“In about 18 months, artificial intelligence will become an assistant to teachers and give them useful feedback. Even after that, they will improve their math skills,” Gates explained. That is, if the answer to a mathematical equation already exists among the data it is trained on, it will be able to give the correct answer without any problem. However, the situation is much more difficult for AI when it has to solve a complex mathematical problem on its own. However, it is not impossible either and we can see it in the example of Photomath.

As Gates concluded at the conference, AI will soon play a major role in education, and in two years artificial intelligence could become a private tutor for many children, Gates believes.

The META platform expects staggering profits this second quarter of this year, despite concerns about declining interest in Facebook or even Instagram. April hasn’t been the best month for the company, but Facebook shares rose yesterday.

TikTok seems to be META’s strongest rival on a global scale at the moment, growing at an alarming rate in terms of the number of users.

Also, Google reported satisfactory results, with digital sales much higher than expected and increased demand for I-Cloud services.

Even Microsoft beat Wall Street Journal analysts’ forecasts and said its Artificial Intelligence products are driving sales.

Meta still remains at risk, as the company’s leaders are obliged, according to the annual budget plans, to cut 21 thousand jobs and make the management structure more efficient for this year. The company cut its forecast for annual spending this year to $86 billion, down from the $92 billion it had previously forecast.

Revenues for the first quarter of this year also fell to 29.5 billion dollars, from 32 billion in the same period a year ago.

The account, called @DisneyJuniorUK, was tweeting vile content, but managed to be verified with a gold tick before being suspended.

The owner alerted his followers by saying “this isn’t actually real right. someone pinch me or something” – and the tweet has since gone viral.

It comes as confusion continues at how Twitter’s updated verification system is working.

Twitter has been approached for comment.

Meanwhile, the “real” Disney Junior account has also been given a gold badge.

Last week Twitter dropped blue marks from “legacy” verified accounts and there is a new colour scheme to its verification system – under the guidance of owner Elon Musk.

Despite many celebrity accounts initially losing their badges – over the weekend most of them were reinstated, with almost every user with more than one million followers receiving a new blue tick.

• Blue: The traditional mark of verification now means the account is subscribed to Twitter Blue, from $8 (£6.40) a month, and completed some verification steps such as having a mobile phone linked to the account. It must also be older than 30 days and have no recent changes to name or handle
• Gold: These marks are reserved for organisations and businesses who pay $1,000 a month plus additional fees for subsequent accounts
• Grey: Is the mark of an official government account, such as a national agency or a head of state

Social media consultant Matt Navarra told the BBC the decision to remove legacy checkmarks was a big mistake, “possibly Elon’s biggest Twitter mistake so far”.

“Twitter has swung from crisis to crisis in the past six months, since Elon took ownership of the platform,” he said.

“He has now created the perfect breeding ground for fake accounts and misinformation, with no real way of keeping its users (or other brands) safe from the mess of his own making. It would not surprise me if we start to see more brands distance themselves from Twitter following this latest blunder.”

This verification is being shared far and wide as an early example of exactly what critics of Elon Musk have warned about – fake accounts getting a badge of authenticity, giving them free rein to share misinformation under a fake veneer of authority.

In this case, the owner of the account seems as amazed as everybody else that it’s happened – it wasn’t exactly trying to pretend to be an official Disney platform. And that asks even more questions- how did this obvious parody end up with a free gold tick?

Twitter has already rolled back free blue ticks for accounts with more than a million followers, and there are increasing numbers of accounts who seem to have badges for which they haven’t paid.

When Mr Musk took over, he said he wanted to level the playing field on Twitter. It wasn’t fair, he said, that Twitter alone got to decide which voices were more important than others.

But there’s also a responsibility that goes along with running a social network, and so far we are seeing lots of examples of his dream of social media by subscription not quite going to plan.