31–40 of 150 posts
[flagged]
> But at least ChatGPT doesn't try to rush you through and ignore your worries just because they want to make their next appoint. But it is a sycophant and will confirm your suspicions, whatever they are and regardless if they're true.
More generally don't try to be your own doctor. Whether you're using LLMs or just searching the web for symptoms, it's way too easy for an untrained person to get way off track. If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school. Otherwise talk to someone who did.
It's anything beyond that which I think needs medical attention.
> "If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor." Yeah, no shit Sherlock? I´d be absolutely embarrassed to even admit to something like this, let alone share the "wisdom perls" like "dont use a machine which guesses its outputs based on whatever text it has been fed" to freaking diagnose yourself? Who would have thought, an individual professional with…
> "If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor." Yeah, no shit Sherlock? I´d be absolutely embarrassed to even admit to something like this, let alone share the "wisdom perls" like "dont use a machine which guesses its outputs based on whatever text it has been fed" to freaking diagnose yourself? Who would have thought, an individual professional with…
I think the author took the wrong lesson here. I've had doctors misdiagnose me just as readily as I've had LLMs misdiagnose me - but I can sit there and plug at an LLM in separate unrelated contexts for hours if I'd like, and follow up assertions with checks to primary sources. That's not to say that LLMs replace doctors, but that neither is perfect and that at the end of the day you have to have your brain turned on…
But it was just a search tool. It could only tell you if someone else was thinking about it. Chatbots as they are presented are a pretty sophisticated generation tool. If you ground them, they function fantastically to produce tools. If you allow them to search, they function well at finding and summarizing what people have said.
But Earth is not a 4-corner 4-day simultaneous time cube. That's on you to figure out. Everyone I know these days has a story of a doctor searching for their symptoms on Gemini or whatever in front of them. But it reminds me of a famous old hacker koan:
> A newbie was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning it off and on.
> Thomas Knight, seeing what the student was doing, reprimanded him: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it without understanding of what is wrong."
> Knight then power-cycled the machine.
> The machine worked.
You cannot ask an LLM without understanding the answer and expect it to be right. The doctor understands the answer. They ask the LLM. It is right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the internet was completely booming and Google was taking over the search engine world, I asked my Doctor if he was afraid that people were going to start getting their medical advice from Google. He basically said, "I'm not worried yet. But I would never recommend someone do that. If you have health insurance, that's what you pay for, not for Google to tell you you're just fine, you really don't have cancer." T…
I have health insurance. I don't feel like I get anything out of paying for it, I still get massive bills whenever I use it.
Except the author did it wrong. You don't just ignore a huge rash that every online resource will say is lyme disease. If you really want to trust an LLM, at least prompt it a few different ways.
[flagged]
The author of the blog post also mentioned they tried to avoid paying for an unnecessary visit to the doctor. I think the issue is somewhere else. As a European, personally I would go to the doctor and while sitting in the waiting room I would ask an LLM out of curiosity.