• ladybugs@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Limiting medical knowledge from reliable information resources would be terrible. I’d say that limiting the spread of plausible-sounding medical misinformation generated by a fancy autosuggest tool is good, though.

    AI chatbots don’t actually “know” anything. They just generate the most statistically probable appearance of a response to each prompt based on their training data. They don’t tell you when something wasn’t in their training data or when there’s limited research on a subject, just give you the most statistically probable response like always, which leads to a “hallucination” that sounds true but isn’t. A tool that’s trained on MCAT testbanks and “aces” the MCAT won’t necessarily give reliable medical advice to real patient questions. Even if you gave an AI chatbot all the accurate training data in the world, it would still hallucinate information occasionally, and it wouldn’t give you any indication of when it did so. If your doctor screws you over, they can lose their license, but if ChatGPT screws you over, there’s currently very little to stop OpenAI from screwing over more people. OpenAI can just stand behind the disclaimer that says ChatGPT can make mistakes, never mind that users are treating it like a licensed medical professional. There are AI tools that are useful in medical research, but they’re a VERY different kind of AI from the AI chatbots this bill is concerned with.

    If you want medical knowledge, there are tons of medical journals, news sources, blogs, and podcasts from doctors/scientists who don’t hallucinate BS when they don’t know something.

    • brachiosaurus@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Instead of banning it then teach people how to use it and not to trust it 100% (who the hell is doing this to begin with?)

      If you want medical knowledge, there are tons of medical journals, news sources, blogs, and podcasts from doctors/scientists who don’t hallucinate BS when they don’t know something.

      I can ask an LLM to help me sourcing these journals and informations

      • ladybugs@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        You can teach people how to use it all day long, but most still won’t use it well consistently in real life. Humans instinctively trust confident-sounding language. Most of us are also way worse at fact checking than we think. LLMs play right into humanity’s flaws, and they’re built to maximize engagement rather than help us avoid going past the tools’ limits. I don’t trust LLMs to be accurate about anything, but I still caught myself reading and failing to check Google AI overviews sometimes before I changed my default search engine to a no-AI alternative. It’s just instinctual when an “answer” is right there at the top of the page in response to your search question.

        Sure, you can use an LLM to help you find sources, but at that point you might as well just use a search engine. There are search engines that provide links with actual text from each site rather than potentially hallucinated summaries.

        • brachiosaurus@mander.xyz
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          2 months ago

          Sure, you can use an LLM to help you find sources, but at that point you might as well just use a search engine. There are search engines that provide links with actual text from each site rather than potentially hallucinated summaries.

          Some popular search engines results are way worst than AI

      • Furbag@pawb.social
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        2 months ago

        Expecting people who have already taken the easy route of asking an AI to summarize medical information to do additional due diligence by reading the sources that the AI spits out is naive as fuck.

        There’s a reason it became a meme for someone to Google their symptoms, click on WebMD to read about it, and then come to the conclusion that they have cancer, all without ever having seen a medical professional in the meanwhile. Do you really think these sorts of people are going to be using AI responsibly for research purposes only?

        • brachiosaurus@mander.xyz
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          2 months ago

          There’s a reason it became a meme for someone to Google their symptoms, click on WebMD to read about it, and then come to the conclusion that they have cancer, all without ever having seen a medical professional in the meanwhile. Do you really think these sorts of people are going to be using AI responsibly for research purposes only?

          If they come to the wrong conclusion at worst they go to the hospital and someone there tells they are wrong and not to worry. We haven’t ban googling your symptoms.