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My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

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Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#11

Post by guywithahat »

> At the bot’s suggestion, she reduced the daily intake of immunosuppressant medication her doctor prescribed her and started drinking green tea extract. She was enthusiastic about the chatbot

I don't know enough about medicine to say whether or not this is correct, but it sounds suspect. I wouldn't be surprised if chatbots, in an effort to make people happy, start recommending more and more nonsense natural remedies as time goes on. AI is great for injuries and illnesses, but I wonder if this is just the answer she wants, and not the best answer.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#12

Post by kingstnap »

> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority

With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly empathetic. They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous.

We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there are obviously a lot of people who really cannot handle the seductivity of things that agree with them like this.

I do think there is pretty good potential in making good progress on this front in though. Especially given the level of care and effort being put into making chatbots better for medical uses and the sheer number of smart people working on the problem.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#13

Post by renewiltord »

Access trumps everything else. A doctor is fine with you dying while you wait on his backlog. The machine will give you some wrong answers. The mother in the story seems to be balancing the concerns. She has become the agent of her own life empowered by a supernatural machine.

> She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority. She had stopped eating the lotus seed starch it had recommended.

The “there’s wrong stuff there” fear has existed for the Internet, Google, StackOverflow. Each time people adapted. They will adapt again. Human beings have remarkable ability to use tools.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#15

Post by torstenvl »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #6

The dangers are obvious (and also there are some fascinating insights into how healthcare works practically in China). I wonder if some kind of "second opinion" antagonistic approach might reduce the risks.

Medical Advice Generative Adversarial Networks would be a good idea.

I see some of this adversarial second-guessing introspection from Claude sometimes. ("But wait. I just said x y and z, but that's inconsistent with this other thing. Let me rethink that.")

Sometimes when I get the sense that an LLM is too sycophantic, I'll instruct it to steelman the counter-argument, then assess the persuasiveness of that counter-argument. It helps.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#16

Post by threetonesun »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #8

This almost certainly isn't only a China problem. I've observed UK users asking questions about diabetes and other health advice. We also have an inexpensive (free-at-point of use for most stuff) but stretched healthcare system. Doubtless there are US users looking at the cost of their healthcare and resorting to ChatGPT instead too. In companies people talk about Shadow-IT happening when IT doesn't cover the user ne…

The joke of looking symptoms up on WebMD and determining you have cancer has been around for... geez over 20 years now. Anti-vaccine sentiment mostly derived from Facebook. Google any symptom today and there are about 10 million Quora-esque websites of "doctors" answering questions. I'm not sure that funneling all of this into the singular UI of an AI interface is really better or worse or even all that different.

But I do agree that some focused and well funded public health bot would be ideal, although we'll need the WHO to do it, it's certainly not coming from the US any time soon.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#17

Post by atoav »

kingstnap wrote: post #12

> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly em…

Well yes, but as an extremely patient person I can tell you that infinite patience doesn't come without its own problems. In certain social situations the ethically better thing to do is to actually to lose your patience, may it be to shake the person talking to you up, may it be to indicate they are going down a wrong path or whatnot.

I have experience with building systems to remove that infinite patience from chatbots and it does make interactions much more realistic.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#18

Post by reenorap »

I and many of my friends have used ChatGPT extremely effectively to diagnose medical issues. In fact, I would say that ChatGPT is better than most doctors because most doctors don't actually listen to you. ChatGPT took the time to ask me questions and based on my answers, narrowed down a particularly scary diagnosis and gave excellent instructions on how to get to a local hospital in a foreign country, what to ask for, and that I didn't have to worry very much because it sounded very typical for what I had. The level of reassurance that I was doing everything right actually made me feel less scared, because it was a pretty serious problem. Everything it told me was 100% correct and it guided me perfectly.

I was taking one high blood pressure medication but then noticed my blood sugar jumped. I did some research with ChatGPT and it found a paper that did indicate that it could raise blood sugar levels and gave me a recommendation for an alternative I asked my doctor about it and she said I was wrong, but I gently pushed her to switch and gave the recommended medication. She obliged, which is why I have kept her for almost 30 years now, and lo and behold, my blood sugar did drop.

Most people have a hard time pushing back against doctors and doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen. ChatGPT gives you the ability to keep asking questions without thinking you are bothering them.

I think ChatGPT is a great advance in terms of medical help in my opinion and I recommend it to everyone. Yes, it might make mistakes and I caution everyone to be careful and don't trust it 100%, but I say that about human doctors as well.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#19

Post by Thoreandan »

Reminds me of an excellent paper I just read by a former Google DeepMind Ethics Research Team member

https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/114/1/4 - Reinecke, Madeline G., et al. "The double-edged sword of anthropomorphism in llms." Proceedings. Vol. 114. No. 1. MDPI, 2025 Author: https://www.mgreinecke.com/

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#20

Post by adzm »

Considering how difficult it is to get patients to talk to doctors, using AI can be a great way to get some suggestions and insight _and then present that to your actual doctor_
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