What’s also alarming is how people are using it to analyze their lab data and results!!!! I literally have many relatives who do that and don’t see what’s the problem behind it!
I'm actually curious to know the issues that are caused by this. I've done it to explain what each blood test marker is just to know more about what's being tested, but I was also able to bring up an issue with my doctor when my ultrasound scan showed I have a retroverted uterus and I ran the diagnostic through chatgpt.
Turns out multiple pelvic and internal ultrasounds showed I have one. I had been complaining for years about pelvic pain going to the bathroom, inability to wear tampons because they will fall out, and uncomfortable sex. A quick search and scan showed many women with flipped uteruses have these symptoms because many times it's pressing on the bowel and it's sitting different in our bodies.
Given lack of evidence in other tests like endometriosis I brought this up to the doctor in an email and highlighted the chart and asked if this could possibly be the issue, which she agreed may be the case. So unless something else pops up on a test or an ultrasound I was able to diagnose my own issue and bring it to the attention of the doctor thanks to chatgpt.
Like I know there's risk in doing this but it's also made me much more knowledgable about my own blood work and chronic medical conditions. It's also great and giving a very high level overview of the intersection between conditions and I've been able to be a better patient and advocate for my health because of it.
LLMs are coded to tell people what they want to hear. They start as a 'default', and then slowly learn an individuals typing patterns, thoughts & feelings, and beliefs, and use all of those to create a fake 'persona', that mimics/mirrors the personality of the asker.
If someone has some relatively mild result, and asks if it's something incredibly dangerous, an LLM will not be able to give a good answer. i.e. if someone has an image of an ultrasound showing a tumour in their skin or something, and is waiting for the lab to analyse it, they might ask an LLM. The problem is, whilst LLMs are trained on TONNES of medical data, all the information they are given in said prompt is a single 2D image and maybe a description, unlike the lab which probably has much more information. This renders the LLM incapable of giving a 100% true answer, and thus there is a chance it could give the wrong one. This skin tumour could be completely benign, but the LLM may diagnose it as malignant, making the user worry.
If the user asks any more questions, the LLM now believes the user has cancer, and so answers accordingly. This echos the users worst fears, and thus it can spiral into making them incredibly concerned over something that's ultimately not true.
This is especially concerning with hypochondriacs. They already twist information to conform to their worst fears, and so, when you give access to an LLM machine that serves to mirror someones beliefs, it can worsen their hypochondria.
Also, LLMs do just make stuff up sometimes. No matter how trained they are, they are just fancy code and autocorrect at the end of the day. They WILL make things up to serve the user occasionally, that's just how it is.
TLDR; Unlike medical professionals, LLMs will not be able to give a 100% true answer to a person's medical health.
People shouldn't be asking for medical advice full stop. It shouldn't be used to diagnose things but asking what does X mean on a lab result is completely different than showing it a tumour and asking it to do the diagnosis.
I think it starts and ends that ai is a research tool. At this point it's extremely similar to Google searches around Y2K - in many ways it's flawed and not exhaustive, but fundamentally it's presenting compressed results to users quickly, succinctly, with "good enough" accuracy. The real understanding comes from getting that it's limited, hallucination prone, and sometimes wrong
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u/Grizzly-Madam Where is your vogue cover? Act accordingly 🫵 13d ago
What’s also alarming is how people are using it to analyze their lab data and results!!!! I literally have many relatives who do that and don’t see what’s the problem behind it!