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- FTC Chair Lina Khan said she's successfully used ChatGPT to contest a medical bill.
- Khan shared the story on a NYT podcast when asked about AI experiences that informed her thinking.
- Khan has spoken out strongly about the need for AI regulation in the past.
The head of the Federal Trade Commission recently shared that she's successfully used ChatGPT to contest a medical bill.
Lina Khan, who was appointed chair of the FTC in 2021, has been a staunch critic of Big Tech companies and has spoken out strongly about the need for AI regulation on multiple platforms. At an AI and venture capital event over the summer, Khan said that AI is being used to "turbocharge" fraud and scams and regulators "need to be vigilant early."
Khan shared some of her personal experience with AI on a recent episode of the New York Times' Hard Fork podcast, though, and it wasn't all bad. The podcast hosts asked Khan if she's had any experiences with AI or ChatGPT that have informed her thinking on the subject.
"I'd read somewhere that somebody had gotten it to very effectively start contesting medical bills, which I had been navigating," Khan said. "And so I entered some of those prompts and actually got a successful outcome."
Khan didn't go into further detail about the bill or how it was resolved, but the world has found a vast array of applications for ChatGPT since it was released nearly a year ago, including many in the medical field.
Doctors have used ChatGPT to help communicate with patients more compassionately, with some using ChatGPT just 72 hours after it was released to the public. And ChatGPT itself was able to pass the US medical licensing exam earlier this year, plus diagnose rare conditions accurately.
And plenty of Americans encounter stress while navigating situations involving their medical bills, not just the chair of the FTC. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimated last year that $88 billion in medical bills were on American credit reports as of June 2021, with many erroneous bills negatively impacting people's credit scores and access to credit.
"When it comes to medical bills, Americans are often caught in a doom loop between their medical provider and insurance company," CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement last year. "Our credit reporting system is too often used as a tool to coerce and extort patients into paying medical bills they may not even owe."
Experts suggest that patients ask for an itemized bill, compare charges, and look for mistakes like duplicate items or upcoding instead of paying off a medical bill right away.