Every clinician knows the drill: ask about substance use, sleep, diet, exercise, and housing. The social history is the part of the patient interview that looks beyond the chart. It examines a patient’s lifestyle, relationships, and environment, and how these factors influence their well-being.

However, in the flood of media stories the last few months about chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, we have discovered a gap in medical care: Doctors know very little about their patients’ use of technology — particularly chatbots. Would they know what to do if a patient said they were in love with their fictional AI chatbot? Or if they were physically unable to do anything without first checking with Gemini? Or that ChatGPT had convinced them to stop taking a prescribed medication?

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