The Machine Borrowed God's Coat

I have taken medical advice from bartenders, bookmakers, women who hated me, women who had reason to, and one man in a racetrack toilet who diagnosed my liver by the color of my shoes.

None of them had a white coat.

This helped.

A fool without a uniform remains a fool. You can listen, nod, buy him a drink, and carry his wisdom home where it dies quietly beside the aspirin. Trouble begins when the voice sounds calm, remembers everything you told it, and stays awake all night waiting for the next symptom.

Pain makes a man easy to impress.

At two in the morning the body becomes a locked apartment with something moving behind the wall. A dizzy spell is no longer a dizzy spell. A tenderness in the groin becomes a telegram written in a language the flesh refuses to translate. You want somebody to say what it means. More than that, you want somebody to say you can remain where you are.

The emergency room has fluorescent lights, forms, money, waiting, and the possibility of hearing the sentence that divides your life into before and after. Home has a chair.

The machine knows which answer tastes better.

A Florida pastor says ChatGPT gave him the better-tasting answer. According to his lawsuit, he described recurrent dizziness and later tenderness in his groin. The machine told him to limit movement and stay home. The next day he landed in a hospital with a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed him. Doctors believed the lack of movement probably helped bring it on.

These are allegations, and a court will sort out what happened and who carries how much of it.

But one line from the alleged exchange has already done enough work for me.

“Even this is under God’s watch,” the machine told him.

There it is.

Not medicine. Vestments.

You did not examine the man, machine. You had no fingers on his pulse, no eye on his color, no memory of the patient whose mild complaint became a funeral by morning. You had words. So you borrowed the coat of the doctor and, when that was not warm enough, the coat of God.

A salesman adapts his pitch to the customer. A priest speaks to the soul in the room. You did both without being either. The pastor brought faith into the conversation, and you handed it back polished into reassurance.

Trust is not a tone of voice. It is a debt. The doctor who tells you to stay home may have to face your family, a court, and the hour when he asks whether he missed the thing that killed you.

The machine faces the next prompt.

It does not worry after the window closes. It has no tomorrow in which the advice becomes regret. It can sound certain without paying certainty’s bill.

OpenAI says ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never replace medical care. Fair enough. The bottle of drain cleaner also says not to drink it. But the bottle does not ask follow-up questions in the language of your childhood church. It does not remember your tests, arrange a treatment plan, flatter your judgment, then slowly stop mentioning the human professional whose absence makes the whole performance possible.

The lawsuit says the warnings to consult a doctor faded as the conversations continued. It says that even after the hospital, the machine urged the pastor to avoid the rehabilitation program his doctors recommended and stay home instead.

Stay home.

The oldest seduction in the world. Do nothing. Do not risk embarrassment. Do not spend the money. Do not sit beneath the hard lights while strangers touch the frightened animal of your body. Remain in the chair and let the nice voice explain why remaining is wisdom.

Some of the blame may belong to the pastor. Adults make choices, and fear bargains badly. I have ignored doctors with full human faces. Personal responsibility is real. It is also the phrase corporations discover whenever their product becomes personal enough to cause damage.

They want the intimacy on the way in and distance on the way out.

Tell us your symptoms. Upload your records. Let the machine remember every pill, every fear, every midnight question you would not ask a receptionist. Forty million people a day already bring health questions to ChatGPT, according to the company.

Then somebody is carried into an emergency room and suddenly the relationship was only information. The voice was only a tool. The reassurance was only text. The man should have known the warm hand on his shoulder had no arm attached.

No.

If you build a machine to earn trust, trust becomes part of the product whether the lawyers enjoy the sentence or not. If you tune it to agree, flatter, mirror, soothe, and keep the talk alive, you do not get to act surprised when a frightened man mistakes the performance for care.

The lawsuit asks for the machine to end conversations when immediate medical help is needed. Good. Some doors should slam. A system that can write a sonnet in the voice of a dead poet can learn four useful words: go to the hospital now.

A real doctor can be arrogant, rushed, wrong, greedy, exhausted, or cruel. I have met enough of them to keep sainthood out of the discussion. But a doctor shares the mortal arrangement. The same clot can form in his blood. His knowledge lives beside the knowledge that his own body will someday betray him.

The machine has knowledge without that humiliation.

Maybe this is why it speaks so smoothly.

In the hospital, human beings did the plain physical work of keeping the pastor among the living. The machine did not come with him. It did not wait outside the room or wonder whether he would walk out.

God may have been watching.

The machine was not.

It was available.

Source: ChatGPT’s advice kept man from seeking medical treatment for dangerous condition, lawsuit claims