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TL;DR: There’s a new, dedicated Health mode in ChatGPT, formalizing what users were already doing: asking it medical questions. OpenAI promises stronger privacy protections and more tailored health guidance—but the update blurs the line between offering context and dispensing potentially dangerous pseudo-medical advice.

What happened: Over 230 million people turn to OpenAI’s chatbot for medical advice each week (ChatGPT, what exactly is this rash?). With the ChatGPT Health update, OpenAI says users can “securely” share their health information with the chatbot. They can also now connect medical records directly to ChatGPT, link their wearables, and pull data from popular health and fitness apps like Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, Peloton, and even AllTrails.

Per OpenAI, conversations in Health are encrypted, isolated from your main chat history, and not used for model training. The company says physicians helped shape its safety guidelines and that ChatGPT should redirect users to real medical professionals when appropriate—though it’s not yet clear where that line is drawn. OpenAI says the tool isn’t for diagnosis or treatment—like that’s going to stop people.

Why it’s a big deal: It’s no surprise that OpenAI, which has seen stalling user growth for its core product, would roll this out. If people are going to ask ChatGPT about confusing lab results or medical questions, the tool should at least be designed to respond in a personalized, safer way. Health mode is also meant to increase accessibility: A user can ask medical questions at all hours, when many clinics are closed, regardless of insurance.

The bad: Say it with us: pri-va-cy. Users already hand over an alarming amount of personal information to ChatGPT, despite warnings from experts. An official health integration could lull users into thinking their medical data is completely secure and that ChatGPT has reliable answers to medical problems (and it’s worth noting that ChatGPT is not HIPAA-compliant).

As a reminder, ChatGPT’s track record isn’t spotless. Recently, a teen in California relied on the chatbot for drug-use guidance and ultimately died from an overdose. In another case, a man asked ChatGPT how to cut sodium out of his diet—after consulting it, he replaced table salt with toxic sodium bromide. He was later hospitalized.

Also notably absent from OpenAI’s announcement: any mention of mental health, an area where the company has faced intense criticism for its failure to do more to protect users showing signs of mental distress.

What to watch: OpenAI says it plans to add more health features down the road, making it even easier to give ChatGPT your entire medical history. —WK

This is where you'll find tiny tech changes that can noticeably improve your life.

Make phones boring again

I’m here, eight days late, to help you with your New Year’s resolution to lower your screen time. If, like me, you can’t stop doomscrolling, switching your phone to grayscale is a surprisingly effective buzzkill—it turns social media from a Vegas slot machine into a sad CVS receipt. It’s helped me slash my screen time from six hours a day to about three, mostly by finally getting bored enough to put the phone down. (And almost all those cuts to screen time were from eliminating social media use.)

How to do it:

On iPhone: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters → toggle Color Filters on → select Grayscale.

On Android: Settings → Accessibility → Vision Enhancements → Color Correction → choose the Grayscale option. —SM

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When tech and culture intersect, things get interesting. Here, we break down a viral crossover moment and rate its chaos level.

Chaos Brewing Meter:

Scams thrive on borrowed authority. The font looks right. The tone feels official. The voice sounds like someone you shouldn’t question. According to a recent Wired report, scammers are now borrowing something even more insidious: the likeness of real religious leaders, convincingly deepfaked and asking for money.

One of the clearest examples, according to Wired, involves Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest and podcaster (yes, that’s a thing) with more than 1.2 million YouTube subscribers. Schmitz warned followers that convincing AI-generated videos of him were circulating, urging viewers to act quickly and send money. And he’s not the only cassocked cleric this is happening to.

Pastors and ministers from churches in Alabama, New York, Florida, Nebraska, and the Philippines have issued similar alerts after scammers impersonated them through deepfake videos, cloned voices, hacked social accounts, and fraudulent DMs. The ruse works because churches do legitimately ask for donations and tithes—though it might be worth a pause if your pastor suddenly wants you to trade crypto. While the scammed are worried about eternal damnation, we're guessing the scammers are not. —WK