cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/374427
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'm not sure that this is an apt comparison, since the laparoscopy tools would still present themselves to the surgeon as "the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity." Since laparoscopy isn't an autonomous system.
These AI systems take the entire process of identifying cancer and automate it. The doctors in this position are no longer required to have this knowledge since the AI "possesses [the] skill and strength in place of the [doctor]" becoming the "virtuoso". Under our capitalist system, this leaves little incentive to continue the process (given mass adoption of the technology) of expending capital on the training necessary. "Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production."
Obviously, this is only one task among many tasks the specialist performs, and there will still be a need for the whole of the specialist's skills. It does, however, produce worse outcomes if, say, the specialist is moved to a facility that lacks this technology after a significant amount of time relying on it. This isn't an issue for laparoscopy in "developed" countries; it is a nearly ubiquitous technology, making the skills of surgeons trained in laparoscopy very portable.
There is ultimately still a net positive here, since these models can be more accurate than humans at identifying cancer. It, however, is another illustration of the cognitive impact AI has on people who engage with it regularly. It illustrates that the sublimation process described in Capital also applies to these AI systems, as machines in the labor process.
It is effectively the same thing, controlling tools with a controller is automating numerous processes that they will 10000% not be able to perform as deftly with their hands even if the steps performed are exactly the same
And, again, is recognizing cancer in a scan the doctor's primary function, or is it knowing how to treat it once its presence is established? You could outsource all the radiography to another human being and still have the same outcome of "the doctor isn't as good at recognizing it anymore." There's a cost benefit analysis to be done of is it better for a doctor to spend a lot of time looking at these scans, and be better at looking at them as a result, or for them to do other shit with their time
It's not effectively the same thing at all. One is an entirely new skill (liproscopy); the other is the elimination of an entire skill (AI detection of cancer). The laproscopy does nothing at all unless the surgen is there to operate it, and the use of laproscopy still demands the previous skills required to perform surgery in the first place.
You wouldn't need to offload the entire process to another human being; you would simply eliminate that human from the labor force. In your scenario, there is still a human with the skill to identify cancer, whereas the AI process begs to have positions eliminated, potentially leaving no one available for that task. The obvious issue with that is leaving the task fully in the hands of a black box, owned and operated by a for-profit corporation, whose insentives are dictated by the mechanics of capitalism and not the hipocratic oath or some other human-centered demand.
Regardless, it would seem you appear to have ignored the part of my comment that states:
And that comes with the huge caviate that @7bicycles@hexbear.net points out in his comment:
No, it's the same damn thing. Laparoscopic surgery uses controllers and robots and shit and a surgeon who does it all the time instead of traditional surgery is going to lose skill in performing surgery in the same way that someone relying on automation to parse radiographic test results would lose their ability to read them properly
Like do you really think someone playing COD is going to retain skills with a gun like come on dawg
It was a direct comparison to the use of AI for this purpose in general. The "other human being" is effectively the AI and giving them the task of parsing radiographic test results would do the exact same damn thing to the doctor in this case, diminish their ability to read it themselves.
Do you need to steal someone else's good point to make an argument? I didn't address it then because it's an entirely different argument ("this is bad because of capitalism") that i agreed with