THE FUSE

In my 2023 book, Understanding and Coping with Illness Anxiety, I wrote a section about the problem of using Google to seek reassurance for health-related fears. Little did I know that three years later, those of us with health anxiety would face another, more formidable obstacle in our quest for instantaneous reassurance: generative artificial intelligence. Reassurance-seeking has always gone hand in hand with illness anxiety: Whether it is going to the emergency room, seeking multiple medical opinions, searching symptoms on Google, or talking to Copilot or ChatGPT, this type of anxiety soothing is regularly employed by anxious individuals. But AI has arguably worsened what can be a slippery slope of immediate reassurance-seeking and comes with significant risks.