Drug or Pokemon? An analysis of the ability of large language models to discern fabricated medications

BackgroundThe use of large language models (LLMs) is increasing in the medical field; however, LLMs are often subject to "confabulations." Notably, LLMs have vulnerability to adversarial attacks, or fabricated details within prompts, which is concerning given both health misinformation and inadvertent errors in the medical record. This purpose of this study was to determine the effect of adversarial attacks by embedding one fabricated medication into a list of existing medicines. MethodsA total of 250 cases were created, which included 4-6 medications and one fabricated medication (a Pokemon character). Four LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Gemma-3-27B-IT, Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, and Qwen3-32B) were tested in triplicate for both dosing information and disease indication with a default prompt, mitigation prompt, and the default prompt with a temperature of 0. If the LLM responded as if the Pokemon were a real medication, it was deemed a confabulation. The primary outcome was the rate of confabulations; exact paired-permutation tests were used to evaluate differences among LLMs and prompting approaches. ResultsConfabulation rates for the default and temperature 0 drug dosing prompt ranged from 86-98.8% and 86.9-98.8% across models, respectively, and from 42-95.6% and 41.6-95.5% for the indication prompt. Incorporating the mitigation prompt substantially reduced confabulation rates to 8.3-76.3% (dosing) and 1.7-28.3% (indication). The best-performing model, Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, demonstrated confabulation rates spanning 1.7-91.9% (p<0.001). ConclusionsLLMs are susceptible to adversarial attacks, especially with medications. Further model improvement is imperative before LLMs are considered safe and reliable for routine use in the medical field.