The use of telehealth soared during the pandemic. In the brave new world of health care, the next step for patients could be receiving information through artificial intelligence instead of from a live person.

"The opportunities for improving health care with AI are massive," said John W. Ayers, Ph.D., of the Qualcomm Institute at University of California-San Diego. "AI-augmented care is the future of medicine."

Ayers and other researchers looked at the role that AI could play in health care in a recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study compared written responses from physicians and those from ChatGPT to real-world health questions. A panel of licensed health care professionals preferred ChatGPT's responses nearly 80% of the time and rated ChatGPT's responses as higher quality and more empathetic.