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I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

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Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A half working system is good enough for real life tasks when combined and used by and in conjunction with attentive half working human collaborators.

What does it mean to be attentive and half working?

You can be attentive while not giving your 100% to the task. For example while writing a piece of code you might know what you want to accomplish but you aren't straining your brain to type out the actual code. So you type the name of the method and GitHub Copilot gives you an implementation of that method.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A half-working system is cute and useful when it recommends a pizza place you might like. But the same system is a menace to society when you tell it to drive a car or prescribe a drug to treat an illness or decide a person's prison sentence or protect a perimeter with lethal force. It's absolutely amazing that so many AI scientists don't seem to understand this distinction.

A half working system is good enough for real life tasks when combined and used by and in conjunction with attentive half working human collaborators.

Translators who've been picking up after machine translation for the last decade will tell you that it is not, in fact, useful to them. They get paid half as much as before, but correcting the machine output is as much work as translating from scratch, and sometimes more, since the machine can give results that look good at first glance but are fundamentally incorrect.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#203
I'm currently working on a machine learning project in healthcare and I'm kind of amazed by the lax attitude a lot of self-proclaimed data scientists seem to have about applying ML/DS methods to healthcare without involving any clinicians, because they insist that the "data doesn't lie"... there seems to be limited interest in exploring causality or the insights these methods provide. Instead the goal for so many is to transfer decision-making to models in the name of "efficiency".

So many people in ML are haughty, arrogant hype-(wo)men, whose disinterest in the fields they are trying to 'disrupt' is gross. Please excuse the rant, but I'm so tired of this hype train.

I agree with the author: people need to be aware of the limitations of machine learning models, but I'd add especially the people building them.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#204
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it a "side effect" is really downplaying things. All of its behavior is just satisfying its heuristic. Just did this chat on 3.5. [Me] Boxes that are black with stars have gold inside. Black with circles means silver. Blue with squares means copper and blue with triangles means tin. Your job is to determine the contents of the box. If you need more information, ask for it. Example: User: I have a black box. A…

Interesting example. I wonder if it is building a small world model (a la SHRDLU), or if it is answering based on the most statistically likely words, or what.

It's both - statistically the next word depends on the world model established by the previous words, so it's devoted some of its neurons to that.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#205
post #179
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a half-working system may be tremendously exciting to AI enthusiasts, but it's not that useful to society. A half-working system might actually be worse than useless if people believe it 100% of the time.

And a 98% working system even worse due to it being treated as 100%.

Well that depends. If a hypothetical emergency room doctor is right about patient diagnoses 90% of the time, then treating the even more hypothetical 98%-correct AI diagnoses as 100% will still probably give you better outcomes.

We're still far off from that, and I'm skeptical we'll get there anytime soon, but humans aren't infallible either.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I didn't predict is so many AI boosters being so miffed at regular folks pointing out the obvious: a half-working system may be tremendously exciting to AI enthusiasts, but it's not that useful to society. Recently we've had all these people complaining of moving goalposts, when in fact most people never had goalposts for AI in the first place, and certainly never had goalposts that remotely resembled those that…

I my mind, the AI only needs to be more reliable than the human expert, and doctors and lawyers and other experts are "only human". There is only so much a human can read and remember. There is only so much they can be convinced to change their mind in the face of new evidence. They get tired. They get cranky. They have biases, and fears. Some doctors are just terrible. I think the AI is probably more reliable than t…

I suspect an ER doctor who misdiagnosed patients 50% of the time would not be an ER doctor for very long.

Also consider that, in this case, the 50% the AI got right was defined such somewhat generously. For each patient, the AI presented several possible diagnoses, only one of which was correct. If the AI were making all the decisions, would the AI also decide to treat the correct ailment in all those cases? In an emergency situation, you may not have the opportunity to go back and try other options if you're wrong the first time.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#207
When talking about errors arguing about error probabilities is not enough. One need to take into account costs of error. A better metric would be "expected cost of error" that multiplies error probabilities by costs of errors (and sums them up). If a system has 0.1% rate of error placing a pizza order it could be deemed OK. If it kills a patient 0.1% of the time it is unacceptble.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inherent problem with chat bots is you can't investigate why they're telling you something. When I search Google, I'm critically evaluating the information, and it's frustrating when the results it gives are low-accuracy. If I ask a chat bot a question, what would I do with the answer if it might be wrong? There's no context for me to evaluate.

You can ask it to explain its reasoning. And it's even more useful if you ask it to show its reasoning when you ask a question, as it improves the answer.

True, though I said investigate, not interrogate. In the context of the pre-bias example I was responding to, it's fine to integrate it into a search engine to assist with guiding you to sources of information, but it shouldn't manipulate the information by describing it to you, even if it also provided source links.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#209
post #66

Being a scifi geek and AI geek and neuroscience geek for pretty much the past 40 years, I've read countless predictions and scenarios and stories about society's response as "true" AI begins to emerge. So watching it play out for real is creating this bizarre sense of deja vu combined with fascination and frustration and also some anxiety. This article and the comments in this thread are right up that alley. I mean,…

Jolly hockey sticks but we have to be rather careful with these things. I've had it devise multiple computer programs from OpenSCAD to BASH and Python because I can get a real feel for what it is really doing, given that I am an IT bod. I'm also a Civil Engineering grad and it really cocked up when I asked a question about normal beam strength and I suspect it will get the pressure at depth thing wrong too. Both of t…

A really bad calculator, IMO. A calculator gives you always-correct answers to specific, well-formed questions in a relatively small domain (math).

ChatGPT gives you approximate and sometimes-wrong answers to arbitrary questions in nearly any domain.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but we are not comparing half time right to nothing, we are comparing how often AI right to how often your local human right. (not the smartest expert human, the human you have access to)

And you believe your local human aka the doctor is right only half the time or even worse?

I think the parent believes the opposite.
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