Did the 'AI doc' blow me off?
I had a telephone consultation with a medical specialist this week. It was not the one I have been dealing with for years now, but a colleague from the same office. Almost the first question he asked was if I was okay with him using AI for my case transcript. I said "no" and explained why (it is highly inaccurate, which is not a good thing for medical records). He assured me he checks everything it writes, and I pointed out this meant he re-types the whole thing anyway (this has been my experience with the technology) so he may as well just do it himself to begin with.
After that he seemed to lose all interest in my condition. As in my test results were "acceptable", even when I pointed out why they were not. I brought up an additional blood test that should be ordered and he said he couldn't do that because blood tests need to be ordered by a hematologist. Which is a little odd since I'm on a regime of regular tests ordered by my original specialist, and my GP orders tests as needed.
He tried to off-load additional symptoms to the GP as well. Guess what; a "GP" is not a specialist and thus isn't really expert in dealing with this condition. I got the distinct impression that this 'doctor' simply didn't want to have anything to do with me, beginning right after I told him I didn't want AI used on my case.
So was he intending to type everything I said into ChatGPT and let it guide him in his diagnosis and how to proceed? That's rather more than using it for a transcript. I now have doubts about his qualifications. Will other doctors become dependent on AI to do their jobs for them? Are they afraid they will make a mistake and the computer is more reliable?
Well it's true humans make mistakes, but in general they don't make that many in any field they've been trained in. Unfortunately the same can not be said for Imitation Intelligence which has proven repeatedly to be horrifically undependable in every way. I'd rather trust a doctor who graduated at the bottom of his class, because at least he graduated - unlike a LLM agent that simply scraped the contents of Grey's Anatomy and pretends to be authoritative based on its ability to regurgitate content.