Why did a pastor say he almost died from listening to a chatbot?

(RNS) — Scott Winters and Justin Lester are both pastors who let a chatbot into their lives. For one of them, dire health consequences followed.

Winters, 55, a Florida pastor, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week after he used ChatGPT for medical advice. For roughly six weeks, he told the chatbot, instead of a doctor, about his worsening symptoms, like dizziness and blood pressure instability. It allegedly reassured him that what he felt was “not something dangerous.” Hours before he was hospitalized with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, it was still telling him this was just another chapter in a familiar story about his body, according to the suit. (A spokesperson for OpenAI argued ChatGPT’s terms of service “ make clear that it is not intended to be used for medical diagnosis or treatment.”)

What makes the case remarkable isn’t the bad medical advice from a chatbot, but that it used the pastor’s own faith to give it to him. As Winters’ symptoms worsened, the chatbot allegedly told him that pushing through a dizzy spell was itself a form of worship . It spoke to him in the same kind of language he used in front of his own congregation. But instead of offering…