Comment on Fears for patient safety as GPs use ChatGPT to diagnose and treat illness

DonPiano@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• mannycalavera@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The best use of AI at the moment is to act as a tool to quickly search and present data quicker than humanly possible. Not to act upon the findings blindly.

  It’s not as easy to say anyone using AI should be fired. There needs to be a more nuanced approach to this. It wholly depends on what the GP did with the information it presented.

  An example: back in the day GPs had a huge book of knowledge they would defer to that was peer researched and therefore trusted. If you came in with an odd symptom they’d spend time (often in front of you) flipping through the book to find that elusive disease they read about that one time at university. Later that knowledge moved to a traditional search engine. Why wouldn’t you now use AI to make that search faster? The AI can easily be trained on this same corpus of knowledge.

  Of course the GP should double check what they are being told. But simply using AI is not the problem you make it out to be. If you have a corpus of knowledge and the GP uses this in a dangerous way then the GP should be fired. But you don’t then burn the book they found this information from.

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  • thehatfox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think the difference here is that medical reference material is based on long process of proven research. It can be trusted as a reliable source of information.

    AI tools however are so new they haven’t faced anything like the same level of scrutiny. For now they can’t be considered reliable, and their use should be kept within proper medical trials until we understand them better.

    Yes human error will also always be an issue, but putting that on top of the currently shaky foundations of AI only compounds the problem.

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    • ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Lets not forget that AI is known for not only not providing any sources, or even falsifying them, but now also flat out lying.

      Our GP’s are already mostly running on a tick-box system where they feed your information (but only the stuff on the most recent page of your file, looking any further is too much like hard work) in to their programme and it, rather than the patient or a trained physician, tells them what we need. Remove GP’s from the patients any more, and they’re basically just giving the same generic and often wildly incorrect advice we could find on WebMD.

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  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Indeed. GPs have been doing this for a long time. It’s nothing new, and expecting every GP to know every single ailment that humanity has ever experienced, to recall it quickly, and immediately know the course of action to take, is unreasonable.

    Like you say, if they’re blindly following a generic ChatGPT instance, then that’s bad.

    If they’re aiding their search using an LLM that has been trained on a good medical dataset, then taking that and looking more into it, then there’s no issue.

    People have become so reactionary to LLMs and other ‘AI’ stuff.

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    • FarceOfWill@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You can build excellent expert systems that will definitely help a do tor remember all the illnesses, know what questions to ask to narrow things down or double check it’s not something weird, and provide options for treatment.

      These exist and are good

      Chargpt isn’t an expert system and doctors using it like one need a serious warning from the BMC and would eventually need to be struck off, same as using ouija boards or bones to diagnose illnesses.

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      • Streetlights@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        These exist and are good

        Any examples off the top of your head? I would assume/speculate they are fairly expensive?

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    • mannycalavera@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Exactly. Love the username BTW.

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    • YungOnions@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      People have become so reactionary to LLMs and other AI stuff. It seems there’s a “omg it’s so cool everybody should use it to the max. Let’s blindly trust it!” camp and a “it’s awful and shouldn’t exist, burn it all! No algorithms or machine learning anywhere. New tech is bad!”

      Both camps are just as stupid. There’s zero nuance in the discussion about this stuff, and it’s tiring.

      Well said.

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  • DonPiano@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    AI != LLM

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• YungOnions@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  ‘Everyone anywhere’? That’s an amazingly broad statement. What’re you defining as ‘using one’? If I use ChatGPT to rewrite a paragraph, should I be fired? What about if a non native speaker uses it to remove grammatical errors from an email, should they be fired? How about using it for assisting with coding errors? Or generating draft product marketing copy? Or summarising content for third parties to make it easier to understand? Still a fireable offence? How about generating insights from data? Assistance with Roadmap prioritisation? Generating summaries of meeting notes or presentations? Helping users with learning disabilities understand complex information? Or helping them with letters, emails etc? How about if it use it to remind me of tasks? Or managing my routines?

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  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Don’t you be bringing nuance into this.

    If you used an LLM to find that mistyped variable name, you deserve to lose your job. You and your family must suffer.

    If you are blind and you use a screen reader with some AI features, you should be fired. You and your family must suffer.

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    • Mrkawfee@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There’s a difference between using LLMs to edit text, provide ideas or give you information that you can double check because you have the subject matter experience. Relying on it as a substitute for skill when something important is at stake like someone’s well being is reckless at best.

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      • YungOnions@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Sure, but the original quote was:

        Everyone anywhere using one on the job should be fired

        There’s no nuance there it’s just AI = bad. I agree that it’s shouldn’t, in its current form, be used as a substitute for skill in important situations. You’re totally right there.

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      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That’s not what was said. What was said was anybody using it in any capacity for any job should be fired.

        Which is obviously a very, very stupid take.

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  • DonPiano@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes.

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• cynar@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s depends purely on how it’s used. Used blindly, and yes, it would be a serious issue. It should also not be used as a replacement for doctors.

  However, if they could routinely put symptoms into an AI, and have it flag potential conditions, that would be powerful. The doctor would still be needed to sanity check the results and implement things. If it caught rare conditions or early signs of serious ones, that would be a big deal.

  AI excels at pattern matching. Letting doctors use it to do that efficiently, to work beyond there current knowledge base is quite a positive use of AI.

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