A doctor who gets refused by ChatGPT doesn't stop needing to communicate with the patient; they fall back to a worse option (Google Translate, a family member interpreting, guessing). Refusal isn't safety, it's liability-shifting dressed up as safety.
If there's no doctor, no interpreter, no pharmacist, just a person with a sick kid and a phone, then "refuse and redirect to a professional" is advice from a world that doesn't exist for them. The refusal doesn't send them to a better option; there is no better option, it's a large majority of people on this planet.
Hell is paved of good intentions, but open-education and unlimited access to knowledge is very good.
It doesn't change the human nature of some people, bad people stay bad, good people stay good.
About PR, they're optimizing for not being the named defendant in a lawsuit or the subject of a bad news cycle, it's self-interest wearing benevolence as a costume.
This is because harms from answering are punishable (bad PR, unhappy advertisers, unhappy investors, unhappy politicians / dictators, unhappy lobbies, unhappy army, etc); but harms from refusing are invisible and unpunished.
