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

inflecthealth.medium.com

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

#231

Post by b112 »

gilbetron wrote: post #24

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,…

But here we are!

Yet in the end, the correct answers are likely identical to webmd or mayo, and the wrong to reddit or twitter, so all we have is a fancy google search.

So far, all the magic I see is the prompts. The knowledge is just random junk, the validation is just "how many internet pages said it", so you can never train new models again, because you now are training on gpt output.

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

#233

Post by dgb23 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #202
singularity2001 wrote: post #173

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.

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.

I think of machine translation as a tool for people who are not translators, but admins, writers and so on, but need cheap translations that are good enough.

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

#234

Post by b112 »

kelnos wrote: post #205
3np wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real problem is how humans react. Imagine a doc comes in, and is very wrong about a diagnosis.

Say... you have a broken arm, doc says it is sprained. You say No! and point out why.

AI says this, you say no, and the minumum wage person who works with the AI, shrugs and says the computer says so.

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

#235

Post by rscho »

MrPatan wrote: post #227

One complaint he has is "It doesn't know to ask the right questions". Well, the prompt was to give diagnoses, not questions. Ask GPT for the follow up questions first, then the diagnoses. This is fascinating in that, because now the machine speaks human, we subconsciously ascribe human agency to it. This guy was instictively treating it like a colleague, who would naturally ask follow up questions unprompted. But you…

Doctors are absolutely not done. You are forgetting that most of medicine is doing things. Doctors are not limited to theory like lawyers are, for instance. And physical robots are still very far from competing with docs.

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

#236

Post by Sunhold »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #202
singularity2001 wrote: post #173

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.

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.

I'm a translator, and that might be true for Google Translate, but not GPT-4. GPT-4 produces translations that are generally accurate, and when instructed to copyedit its own work, well-written. In most cases, all I need to do is fix the occasional error and do some light copyediting. This is much less work than translating from scratch and results in superior quality, since it combines my own skills with the AI's. It is also useful for researching equivalents to obscure terms across languages.

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

#237

Post by dgb23 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #132
civilized wrote: post #37

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…

Apparently much of the usefulness of ChatGPT comes from human guidance via reinforcement learning. The base model seems to be quite useless, but with only a little bit of human input it becomes deceptively smart.

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

#238

Post by amai »

jspdown wrote: post #232

Is it legal in the US to send patient data to a third party service? In the context of a scientific study, with explicit patient agreement things are different of course. But I haven't seen any of that in the article.

The author writes in the article:

„I anonymized my History of Present Illness notes for 35 to 40 patients — basically, my detailed medical narrative of each person’s medical history, and the symptoms that brought them to the emergency department — and fed them into ChatGPT.“

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

#239

Post by mandmandam »

rscho wrote: post #235
MrPatan wrote: post #227

One complaint he has is "It doesn't know to ask the right questions". Well, the prompt was to give diagnoses, not questions. Ask GPT for the follow up questions first, then the diagnoses. This is fascinating in that, because now the machine speaks human, we subconsciously ascribe human agency to it. This guy was instictively treating it like a colleague, who would naturally ask follow up questions unprompted. But you…

Doctors are absolutely not done. You are forgetting that most of medicine is doing things. Doctors are not limited to theory like lawyers are, for instance. And physical robots are still very far from competing with docs.

Don't underestimate how many walls and obstacle lawyers have put up in order to entrench and 'justify' their obscene charges.

And don't expect them not to create more to fight back against any sort of AI assisted affordable legal system. I have no doubt that the big firms are already crafting up some connivations to shenanigan us with.

And some doctors will probably hire them to do the same for their field.

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

#240

Post by detrites »

MrPatan wrote: post #227

One complaint he has is "It doesn't know to ask the right questions". Well, the prompt was to give diagnoses, not questions. Ask GPT for the follow up questions first, then the diagnoses. This is fascinating in that, because now the machine speaks human, we subconsciously ascribe human agency to it. This guy was instictively treating it like a colleague, who would naturally ask follow up questions unprompted. But you…

One thing the article misses is doctors are not all equal. Some are freaking terrible. Others may be competent but susceptible to bad decisions when overworked. Others are simply great. How does ChatGPT fare against the whole group?

For one, it can't become "overworked", so at least better in that regard. It may well be better than a terrible doctor too. Given malpractice is consistently a leading cause of death, it seems something worth mentioning.

Not advocating for folks to self-diagnose using ChatGPT, though for better or worse people already do that via Google. But it's an important omission that "doctor" is not a fixed, reliable measure to test against.

On the other hand, another thing the article misses is ChatGPT can't see, feel, touch or take any measurements interactively. It's purely text-based. How many doctors work like that? Some, maybe - but certainly not in the ER.

Interesting experiment though.

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