After the internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, has changed our knowledge, artificial intelligence is going to transform everything. It's not a stretch to say that artificial intelligence is a game-changer. And it seems inevitable that doctors are being affected, if not under threat.
A randomised clinical trial, published in JAMA Network Open, found that the use of a large language model did not significantly enhance doctors' diagnostic reasoning beyond that of conventional point-of-care decision support resources such as UpToDate. Surprisingly, though, the large language model alone performed better than the physicians.
Wait, does it mean a chatbot can be the solution? Even if that were a good idea, we should be mindful of the pitfalls. We shouldn't just copy and paste what patients say to a chatbot. That brings me to the story of Nicky in Blue Sisters, a beautiful novel written by Coco Mellors. Nicky suffered from endometriosis, a painful condition in which the cells in her uterus are growing in the wrong places. Sadly, Nicky died of fentanyl overdose. Can you imagine how many times Nicky had been asked to rate her pelvic pain on a scale of one to ten?
It was a riddle: Choose too low and she might not get the painkillers she needed, choose too high and she'd be dismissed as hysterical. A chatbot can never imagine that Nicky had to do tricks with the number. She tried six, seven, eight, nine ... She never dared consider herself a ten.
That riddle can never be solved by a chatbot, not even by a doctor without empathy.
No comments:
Post a Comment