alt Hacker NewsI’m currently facing a severe health condition and I can’t help but ask various LLMs about it. They all will eventually offer solutions or avenues that sound promising or ‘easy’ when I know better, that the path ahead of me is hard, however they will non-chalantly offer a path forward they insist will work. The best part is when it cites commercial websites promotional statements as facts, though it will also misinterpret medical journals if I say to restrict itself to that.
In closing, my Redfin escapism has shifted to LLM medical escapism, I know better but if you don’t or you are in even more dire straits, it provides such an illusion of hope and that’s dangerous.
I was having a conversation with someone about AI taking over medical jobs the other day, and one of the things that came out of my thoughts about it is related:
It obviously has flaws, and we should never stop trying to improve it, but I think AI can be a great way to help connect a bunch of information they have to a bunch of information they don't, or to help spot patterns and potential avenues that they happened to miss. And obviously you want to be careful about becoming over-reliant on it, or being too trusting when it can be wrong. But I think we've been at the point for a long time where a doctor using a search engine to find medical literature should be a very reasonable thing to do, and I think AI can at least be an incremental (but massive) improvement on that workflow.
But I hope the end result of that is that doctors can not only deliver better (and maybe better-informed and more open-minded) treatment, but can spend the time focusing on patient care, managing expectations / risk management around uncertainty, managing the emotions inherent in someone who may be losing their life or the lives of their loved ones. Those are things AI is definitely not well-equipped to do as you point out.