Millions use chatbots to look up symptoms or seek clarity on medical reports that can seem opaque or technical (Image: Getty)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
Elon Musk recently revealed that he uploaded the results of his own MRI scan to Grok, the artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by his company xAI, and that both his doctors and Grok came back with the same \u201cclean” assessment. Musk\u2019s account, shared on the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis, was framed as a vote of confidence, a hint that people could use AI to double-check their medical scans and test results.<\/p>\n
SpaceX and Tesla founder\u2019s clip resurfaced after he retweeted a post by Tesla Owners Silicon Valley that highlighted a remarkable case involving Grok. The post claimed that in late 2025, a 49-year-old Norwegian man, on X, credited xAI\u2019s Grok with saving his life following a misdiagnosis.<\/p>\n
Musk went further, exhorting users in the video from June 2025 saying, \u201cI think AI will be very helpful with the medical stuff. Right now you can upload your X-rays or MRI images to Grok and it will give you a medical diagnosis. I have seen cases where it\u2019s actually better than what doctors tell you.”<\/p>\n
In his posts, he has suggested that Grok\u2019s interpretation might rival or even surpass what doctors provide, pointing to anecdotal cases where the chatbot flagged something that clinicians had missed.<\/p>\n
Can AI Offer A Reliable Second Opinion?<\/strong><\/p>\nAI tools analysing medical data are not new. Radiology departments have used machine learning for years to highlight areas of concern in scans, helping to triage workloads and flag anomalies in medical reports but Grok and its peers operate in a very different domain, they\u2019re general-purpose chatbots, not dedicated medical systems trained on carefully curated clinical datasets.<\/p>\n
In Musk\u2019s own promotion of the technology, he has suggested that Grok\u2019s medical analysis is \u201cquite accurate” and will improve with time. He points to cases including a Norwegian man whose appendix issue was flagged by the AI when his doctors initially missed it, as evidence that these tools can add value.<\/p>\n
Grok is not alone in the race to bring AI into healthcare. This week, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health, a new feature within the chatbot that lets users securely link their medical records and wellness apps such as MyFitnessPal and Apple Health. OpenAI said the data shared through this feature will not be used to train its models, a move aimed at addressing growing concerns around privacy and trust in AI-driven health tools.<\/p>\n
How Does AI Healthcare Invades Privacy?<\/strong><\/p>\nBeyond accuracy, there\u2019s the question of data privacy. When users upload medical scans to a chatbot on a social platform, they may unwittingly expose sensitive health information in ways that conventional healthcare systems are designed to protect. Unlike medical records stored under stringent regulations, data shared on social media platforms isn\u2019t subject to the same privacy safeguards. Experts warn that this could lead to unintended consequences if images or associated metadata are used for training AI or shared more widely than users realise.<\/p>\n
Medical ethicists also raise concerns about equity and bias. Training models on self-submitted scans from a subset of users may produce algorithms that work better for some populations than others, particularly if the underlying dataset isn\u2019t representative of broader demographic diversity.<\/p>\n
Despite these warnings, many people are already turning to AI for health-related queries. Millions use chatbots to look up symptoms or seek clarity on medical reports that can seem opaque or technical. Industry figures suggest that tens of millions of users have sought health information from large language models in the past year alone.<\/p>\n
AI in Healthcare: Where Does Responsibility Lie?<\/strong><\/p>\nA study published in May 2025 found that while no AI model is without limits in interpreting medical data, Grok outperformed Google\u2019s Gemini and ChatGPT-4o in identifying pathological signs across 35,711 brain MRI slices.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s promotion of Grok as a tool for medical interpretation has prompted debate about the boundaries of AI in healthcare. While he argues for its potential, others caution that encouraging people to treat a chatbot as a medical second opinion carries risks if users misinterpret or over-rely on its output.<\/p>\n
Doctors are not blind to the technology\u2019s potential. In controlled settings, AI can assist radiologists, help prioritise cases and even pick up subtle patterns humans might overlook but there\u2019s broad consensus among clinicians that AI should augment human expertise, not sideline it.<\/p>\n
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