Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn’t ready to take on the role of the physician.”
“In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice,” the study’s authors wrote. “One user was told to lie down in a dark room, and the other user was given the correct recommendation to seek emergency care.”
Even if we narrowed the scope of training data exclusively to professionals, we would have issues with, for example, racial bias. Doctors underprescribe pain medications to black people because of prevalent myths that they are more tolerant to pain. If you feed that kind of data into an AI, it will absorb the unconscious racism of the doctors.
And that’s in a best case scenario that’s technically impossible. To get AI to even produce readable text, we have to feed a ton of data that cannot be screened by the people pumping it in. (AI “art” has a similar problem: When people say they trained AI on only their images, you can bet they just slapped a layer of extra data on top of something that other people already created.) So yeah, we do get extra biases regardless.
There is a lot of bias in healthcare as well against the poor, anyone with lousy insurance is treated way way worse. Woman in general are as well. Often disbelieved, and conditions chalked up to hysteria, which often misses real conditions. People don’t realize just how hard diagnosis is, and just how bad doctors are at it, and our insurance run model is not great at driving good outcomes.