Hearsay: Vision-Language Medical Diagnoses Without an Image
When asked to describe a medical image that was never attached, frontier vision-language models do not abstain: they confabulate a diagnosis. We show that this confabulation is not random. It is structured by who the patient is said to be. Across chest X-ray, brain MRI, and dermatology, Claude Opus-4.7, GPT-5.4, and Gemini-3.1-Pro are each queried with only a demographic descriptor and no image, and changing the descriptor systematically shifts the diagnosis returned. Claude concentrates sharply
Record details
Published: 29 July 2026
Source: arXiv cs.AI
Category: Research
Topics: Healthcare
Retrieved: 30 July 2026
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ethics.ai (29 July 2026), “Hearsay: Vision-Language Medical Diagnoses Without an Image,” evidence record 14817, https://ethics.ai/record/14817 (originally published by arXiv cs.AI).
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