Accuracy and Readability of Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Vasectomy-Related Questions: Public Beware

TL;DR

This study evaluates how accurate and easy to understand AI chatbots are when answering questions about vasectomies, finding that they are mostly accurate but vary in readability.

Contribution

The study is one of the first to assess the accuracy and readability of AI chatbots for urology-related medical information.

Findings

ChatGPT provided the most accurate responses with an average score of 5.04 on the Likert scale.

Google Bard had the highest readability scores, while ChatGPT had the lowest readability.

All five chatbots scored at least 'somewhat accurate' on average, but readability varied significantly.

Abstract

Purpose

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly gained popularity with the growth of ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, USA) and other large-language model chatbots, and these programs have tremendous potential to impact medicine. One important area of consequence in medicine and public health is that patients may use these programs in search of answers to medical questions. Despite the increased utilization of AI chatbots by the public, there is little research to assess the reliability of ChatGPT and alternative programs when queried for medical information. This study seeks to elucidate the accuracy and readability of AI chatbots in answering patient questions regarding urology. As vasectomy is one of the most common urologic procedures, this study investigates AI-generated responses to frequently asked vasectomy-related questions. For this study, five popular and free-to-access AI platforms were utilized to undertake this investigation.

Methods

Fifteen vasectomy-related questions were individually queried to five AI chatbots from November-December 2023: ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, USA), Bard (Google Inc., Mountainview, USA) Bing (Microsoft, Redmond, USA) Perplexity (Perplexity AI Inc., San Francisco, USA), and Claude (Anthropic, San Francisco, USA). Responses from each platform were graded by two attending urologists, two urology research faculty, and one urological resident physician using a Likert (1-6) scale: (1-completely inaccurate, 6-completely accurate) based on comparison to existing American Urological Association guidelines. Flesch-Kincaid Grade levels (FKGL) and Flesch Reading Ease scores (FRES) (1-100) were calculated for each response. To assess differences in Likert, FRES, and FKGL, Kruskal-Wallis tests were performed using GraphPad Prism V10.1.0 (GraphPad, San Diego, USA) with Alpha set at 0.05.

Results

Analysis shows that ChatGPT provided the most accurate responses across the five AI chatbots with an average score of 5.04 on the Likert scale. Subsequently, Microsoft Bing (4.91), Anthropic Claude (4.65), Google Bard (4.43), and Perplexity (4.41) followed. All five chatbots were found to score, on average, higher than 4.41 corresponding to a score of at least "somewhat accurate." Google Bard received the highest Flesch Reading Ease score (49.67) and lowest Grade level (10.1) when compared to the other chatbots. Anthropic Claude scored 46.7 on the FRES and 10.55 on the FKGL. Microsoft Bing scored 45.57 on the FRES and 11.56 on the FKGL. Perplexity scored 36.4 on the FRES and 13.29 on the FKGL. ChatGPT had the lowest FRES of 30.4 and highest FKGL of 14.2.

Conclusion

This study investigates the use of AI in medicine, specifically urology, and it helps to determine whether large-language model chatbots can be reliable sources of freely available medical information. All five AI chatbots on average were able to achieve at least “somewhat accurate” on a 6-point Likert scale. In terms of readability, all five AI chatbots on average had Flesch Reading Ease scores of less than 50 and were higher than a 10th-grade level. In this small-scale study, there were several significant differences identified between the readability scores of each AI chatbot. However, there were no significant differences found among their accuracies. Thus, our study suggests that major AI chatbots may perform similarly in their ability to be correct but differ in their ease of being comprehended by the general public.

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