As members of the public increasingly turn to AI with health concerns, University of Birmingham researchers are leading a global programme to build the first definitive guide for safely navigating health information on AI powered chatbots.

The initiative is announced today in a correspondence published in Nature Health. The project team is now inviting the public to help shape the development of The Health Chatbot Users' Guide, a resource designed to offer a pragmatic and neutral approach that focuses on harm reduction and maximising benefits to users.

With the advent of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and Gemini, millions of people worldwide are already using general-purpose chatbots including to interpret symptoms and simplify medical jargon.

However, the team of academics, health professionals, and technologists warn that these tools currently exist in a governance vacuum, leaving individual users to distinguish between evidence-based insights and 'hallucinated' or factually incorrect advice.