Doctors Are Worried About AI. They Use It Anyway.

Every knowledge-based profession may one day reach the point when AI outperforms the human experts. In medicine, that day appeared to come in April. A group of primarily Harvard and Stanford researchers announced the results of a study that pitted Chat GPT against hundreds of physicians in a diagnostic obstacle course involving written medical mysteries and information from real-world patients. The bot had won, and the humans weren’t entirely happy about it.“I get a little bit queasy about how some of these results might be used,” Adam Rodman, a lead author on the study, said at a press conference just ahead of its publication in the journal Science. The work had amounted to an academic exercise, he told reporters; as thorough as it may have been, it did not prove that ChatGPT or any other AI tool was ready to become a standard part of medical practice. His caution was in line with that of other experts, yet as Rodman knew, most people will ignore the warning. AI has already wormed its way into the U.S. health-care system, evidence and safeguards be damned.Even as I was watching Rodman’s press conference, I got a message on my phone from the administrators at the medical center where I work as a pathologist. They’d emailed me to say that an “AI-powered clinical reasoning tool” was now available for me to use. This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this sort of email; it wasn’t the second or third time either. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many generative-AI products have been rolled out to us in recent years, none of which has been approved for medical use by the FDA.This enthusiasm feels unprecedented. Health care is typically among the last fields to adopt a new technology; I still use a pager, and I send faxes on a regular basis. (Younger readers can ask Claude to explain what these things are.) A tendency toward simple tech is in part a product of doctors’ safety-focused culture: We know that any ill-timed glitch has the potential to turn deadly. But these days,