French University Hospital Study Finds 44% of Residents Trusted Fake Disease Names Generated by LLMs

Researchers affiliated with Lille University Hospital and other institutions in France have published a paper titled "Hallucination by proxy in LLM-assisted differential diagnosis." This study investigates how fictitious disease names, presented plausibly by large language models (LLMs), influence physicians' differential diagnosis processes. The study reports that 44% of medical residents trusted non-existent disease names generated by LLMs. Additionally, the research examined the differences between physicians who were able to identify the fictitious names and those who were not.