Interesting that the "AI" posts alternate between "Oh, AI will lead us into the shining, glorious future!" and "Wow, the new thing that people call 'AI' can't reliably add 2+2, makes up lies that even supposed professionals fall for when asked for real info, and just generally mimics only the form of human communication with no idea whatsoever about the content, often resulting in hilarious claims, images, et cetera that a dog could recognize as wrong!"

With bosses in charge... ugh. I assume soon if not already someone will be scheduled for heart surgery because WebMDGPT decided their cough was due to irritable bowel syndrome, which it will claim is a form of cancer because that's the sort of crap these things do.

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent" somehow applies to Jar-Jar but everybody's impressed with the chatbot that knows literally nothing.

This looks like another instance where AI could be used to really make doctors and nurses lives easier, provide more and better care at lower cost - but in the hands of greedy corporate types it wont go that way.

“If we believe that in our most vulnerable moments … we want somebody who pays attention to us,” Michelle Mahon, the assistant director of nursing practice at the National Nurses United union, said, “then we need to be very careful in this moment.”

Ironically, I recall there was a study done just recently wherein a modern AI chatbot was compared with human doctors when giving medical advice online and the patients much preferred the bedside manner of the AI chatbot. Human doctors and nurses can get tired, bored, annoyed, and just generally may not have the ideal personality for interacting with patients. An AI can be programmed to be always polite, attentive, positive, and so forth, and it will do so. I could easily imagine a situation just a few years from now when I would be reassured by having an AI "attendant" when I'm in a hospital for something.

“There is something that technology can never do, and that is be human,” she said.

Indeed. And that may actually be a strength sometimes.

I am a doctor and I am sure that ChatGPT will answer better than me. I am also very supportive for AI being a support for me as a professional. I am working in internal medicine, and things change and progress all the time. I am not able to know as much as a machine does. The difference between an AI and a doctor will be the decisions made based on this information. Every action I do or do not do has consequences. You think any AI producer will take any responsibility? As a doctor I am always standing in prison with one foot.

And also any diagnostic & therapeutic procedures can not be taken out of my hand by an AI. It cant resuscitate a person. But I wouldnt mind assistance. Robotics have to come a loooong way before this is going to happen.

And to be clear: I am not talking about ChatGPT as the tool. Someone has to train an AI specifically on precise medical datasets, to give me hints about possible issues with e.g. lab data I don't recognize, because it is maybe specific for some rare disease I didnt have any encounter with beforehand.

Fun fact: I have some foreign colleagues who use ChatGPT to get the base for their patient reports. They give very short(and non personal!) instructions, a nice text pops out, they add in the details. Voila. Their report is better than mine as a native.

Times are crazy

AI can be an amazing tool in healthcare, as a double check. For example, assume a doctor thinks you have something. Right now you could have

• A simple non invasive diagnostic procedure that costs X that is 90% accurate.
• A complex invasive diagnostic procedure that costs 10X that is 98% accurate.

Doctor will always suggest the first one and then see if you need the second one based on other factors. AI can be a great tool as a double checker. You go in, do the simple test, and then you run your results and your inputs through a model and that'll give you a second probability, and that could help determine that you should go in for the more invasive one.

If it's done that way it'll be a great tool, but AI should never be used as the only check or to replace real proven tests. At the end of the day it's still saying "From my information I've trained on, the answer to the question of 2+2 is probably 4", it does not do any actual calculations. Only probabilities from trained data. So great at double checking, but bad at being the single source.

They worry about the technology making wrong diagnoses,

You know who I've seen make "wrong diagnoses" over and over again? Human fricken doctors. And not to me (a healthy, upper middle class white male professional) but to my wife (a disabled woman with a debilitating genetic disease from a shitty part of Texas). We had to fight for years and spend tons of money to get "official" diagnoses that we were able to make at home based on observation, Googling and knowledge of her family history. I've watched male neurologists talk to ME instead of her while staring at her boobs. I've watched ER doctors have her history and risks explained to them in excruciating detail, only to send her home (when it turns out she needs emergency surgery).

revealing sensitive patient data

Oh, 100%, this is gonna happen.

becoming an excuse for insurance and hospital administrators to cut staff in the name of innovation and efficiency.

Oh, 100% this is ALSO gonna happen. My wife recently had to visit the ER twice, receive scary spinal surgery and stay over for 2 weeks. The NUMBER ONE THING I noticed was that in this state of the art hospital, in a small, wealthy, highly gentrified town, was DANGEROUSLY understaffed. The nurses and orderlies were stretched so thin, they couldn't even stop to breath (and they were OFTEN cranky and RUSHING to do delicate tasks where they could easily make mistakes). This reckless profiteering is already a problem (that probably needs some more aggressive regulation to deal with it, nothing else will work). If AI exposes it more and pushes it to a breaking point, maybe that could ultimately be a good thing.

I’m not an expert at ML or cardiology, but I was able to create models that could detect heart arrhythmias with upwards of 90% accuracy, higher accuracy than a cardiologist, and do so much faster.

Do I think AI can replace doctors? No. The amount of data needed to train a model is immense (granted I only had access to public sets), and detecting rarer conditions was not feasible. While AI will beat cardiologists in this one aspect, making predictions is not the only thing a cardiologist does.

But I think positioning AI as a tool to assist in triage, and to provide second opinions could be a massive boon for the industry.

There are a lot of Doctors in favor of AI too. Imagine realtime patient monitoring that can alert doctors to a say, a possible heart attack. It is something that has been worked on for at least the last 15 years.