cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34581821
paywall bypass: https://archive.is/whVMI
the study the article is about: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
article text:
AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study
By Harry Black
August 12, 2025 at 10:30 PM UTC
Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study.
AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed, their ability to find tumors dropped by about 20% compared with rates before the tool was ever introduced, according to findings published Wednesday.
Health-care systems around the world are embracing AI with a view to boosting patient outcomes and productivity. Just this year, the UK government announced £11 million ($14.8 million) in funding for a new trial to test how AI can help catch breast cancer earlier.
The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, “leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,” the scientists said in the paper.
They surveyed four endoscopy centers in Poland and compared detection success rates three months before AI implementation and three months after. Some colonoscopies were performed with AI and some without, at random. The results were published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology journal.
Yuichi Mori, a researcher at the University of Oslo and one of the scientists involved, predicted that the effects of de-skilling will “probably be higher” as AI becomes more powerful.
What’s more, the 19 doctors in the study were highly experienced, having performed more than 2,000 colonoscopies each. The effect on trainees or novices might be starker, said Omer Ahmad, a consultant gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London.
“Although AI continues to offer great promise to enhance clinical outcomes, we must also safeguard against the quiet erosion of fundamental skills required for high-quality endoscopy,” Ahmad, who wasn’t involved in the research, wrote a comment alongside the article.
A study conducted by MIT this year raised similar concerns after finding that using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write essays led to less brain engagement and cognitive activity.
I wonder if mathematicians who never used a calculator are better at math than mathematicians who typically use a calculator but had it taken away for a study.
Or if grandmas who never got smartphones are better at remembering phone numbers than people with contacts saved in their phone.
Tip: your brain optimizes. So it reallocates resources away from things you can outsource. We already did this song and dance a decade ago with "is Google making people dumb" when it turned out people remembered how to search for a thing instead of the whole thing itself.
Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.
Every time 'new tool makes old skills rusty' is treated as novel, I'm reminded of The Gentleman's Magazine:
This was a crank-powered adding machine. Numbers used levers instead of buttons because buttons hadn't been invented yet. There were already people who expected it the next version would do everything for us - and people who thought that would be bad, somehow.
Seriously at what point did search engines stop matching results by keyword?! Just a few days ago I tried looking for a quote I didn't fully remember, but knew the basic thesis and some identifying terms it definitely mentioned and all I got was tabloid articles for pages and pages on end which only vaguely matched the thesis but didn't mention any of the identifying terms I remember the quote using. It threw me for a loop because I remember being taught in school to search for stuff this way and I don't know if I'm just stupid or misremembered the quote or search engines don't actually match keywords anymore. Why would they remove the most basic form of search, literally just regexing for all the strings given?!
This year they stopped fucking trying. You search three words and it ignores two of them. "We didn't find many results for that." Yeah! That's why I wrote it that way! I didn't type "colossus of argyle" because I wanted a thousand generic pages about a statue. Gimme some damn prog.
Anything skills based has to be practiced.