It's not 'lying' when they don't know the truth to begin with. They could be trying to answer accurately and it'd still be dangerous misinformation.

Not just health information. It is easy to make them LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING.

I sincerely hope people understand what LLMs are and what they're aren't. They're sophisticated search engines that aggregate results into natural language and refine results based on baked in prompts (in addition to what you provide), and if there are gaps, the LLM invents something to fill it.

If the model was trained on good data and the baked-in prompt is reasonable, you can get reasonable results. But even in the best case, there's still the chance that the LLM hallucinates something, that just how they work.

For most queries, I'm mostly looking for which search terms to use for checking original sources, or sometimes a reference to pull out something I already know, but am having trouble remembering (i.e. I will recognize the correct answer). For those use cases, it's pretty effective.

Don't use an LLM as a source of truth, use it as an aid for finding truth. Be careful out there!

Meh. Google Gemini has given me great medical advice always couched carefully in “but check with your doctor.” and so on.

I was surprised too.