Tag Archive for: AI

The Memo: AI-Free Zone

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I’m still bugged about the topic I wrote about last week, polyphenols in fruit. It’s not that I don’t think it was an interesting topic. It was. Why did it show up in press release now when it was published in 2023? My sense is that AI was involved, based on what I’ve read and what I’ve researched in the past. I’m going to change the way I select topics to write about.

But that’s not the real reason I’m writing this. It is to let you know that everything that’s posted on my website was written by me. I do use a specific AI to search for background research on topics (one expert said to think of AI as an eager research assistant, and that’s how I use it). I read research papers that AI finds, and I know the field well enough to know a good source from one that’s bad. Once I read enough research, I write about the topic. Then my editor of 36 years verifies what I’ve written makes sense or recommends changes that makes it clear what I intended to write. Then it goes to you.

It’s not that AI doesn’t offer to write something, but it doesn’t have a database of life experiences in addition to my knowledge base. It cannot think, has never run a marathon, got a knee replaced, or dealt with any of the human conditions we face. If you read what it writes, it sounds hollow because when AI writes, it’s not choosing the best word—it’s giving you the most common word to occur in that particular phrase.

One area is not free from AI: the illustrations. Paula says it’s almost impossible to find art that hasn’t been touched by AI. It’s not just the image of a hippo in a track suit eating ice cream; it’s almost every image, no matter how ordinary, but we work hard to make sure the images aren’t misleading and try to exclude anything made with generative AI.

Just know that the Memo and everything I write or say originated with me. This is an AI-free zone and is going to stay that way.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Artificial Intelligence? Focus on Artificial

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Recently, I researched a topic on PubMed, the government database of published scientific research. There was a posting on the home page that the National Center for Biotechnological Information would be down for usual maintenance. That’s something we’ve come to expect from just about any database-based website.

But it made me pause for a few minutes. When I use AI to research a topic, I’m not really interested in what it says; I’m interested in the research the AI used to formulate its answer. For topics I search for, the research has to include scientific research from PubMed and other science databases. I ignore comments based on information from other websites that are based on interpretation of research rather than the research itself.

What occurred to me were these questions:

  • What if studies on some topics were intentionally left out of the database? That means that we would not be getting the full research on important health conditions and treatments.
  • What if some studies that were not peer-reviewed were added to the database? If that were to happen, a researcher with enough familiarity with prior research might be able to understand that something isn’t right, but people looking for answers for their own health and disease might accept what AI produced.

If you use AI to search for answers related to health and disease, check the references the AI provides. Here is my ranking of references you can use as a guideline by degrees of importance:

First degree
The actual research paper(s). You can read the abstract if nothing else.

Second degree
The press release hitting the highlights about the research, typically from the laboratory or agency that did the research.

Third degree
A credentialed health expert’s evaluation of the actual research, although this is subject to bias.

Fourth degree
A comment on the press release by just about anyone with a website or a podcast? Forget it. Use it to find clues to the original research, but don’t base any life changes on it.

As I said, I use the research papers only to verify that AI searched for and found papers related to the topic. Once past that level, there can always be some form of bias in the references.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

  • First, AI is only as good as the databases it’s allowed to search to find answers. By disallowing certain sources of research, it’s easy to influence the direction of the response.
  • Second, artificial means just that. AI can search, prioritize, and use algorithms to perform the search, and it will do it fast. But at the end of the day, it’s artificial—it’s a computer—with no ability to interpret what it’s sending you.

For more perspective, I’ll assign you a movie: watch Terminator again and think about Skynet.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

AI and Healthcare

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What if, at some point in the future, your next physical is done via a holographic physician? The hologram will be chosen specifically for you, based on age, gender, and other characteristics collected from your posts on social media, websites you’ve visited, music you’ve listened to, shows you’ve watched on television or whatever replaces that in the future. Even the voice will be one that’s chosen just for you. Within seconds, maybe a few minutes, you completely forget that you’re not talking to a real human physician; you’re talking to something created with artificial intelligence. He or she is now your “physician.”

Another article I read had nothing to do with the medical profession. It had everything to do with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by Google. It could take decades to get to any semblance of AI at this point although there’s an acceleration in technology that seems to happen. The question is whether it will be a good thing or not.

Certainly, there will be a vast amount of data collected from you: blood and urine for sure. DNA as well as the microbiome and maybe things we haven’t considered before such as odors. Computers will be able to analyze billions of bits of data in milliseconds. They can scan obscure medical journals and everything ever written about any condition. But then comes the real trick: the ability of the machine to put that all into a diagnosis and if necessary, a treatment plan.

Could AI do all that? Sure, based on just numbers and data and probabilities. The problem would be this: “Wait a minute. What I’m seeing while examining this person doesn’t match these numbers.” Or “there’s more going on here than what I see in the numbers.”

That’s what a human physician, with years of training, will be able to do. I can’t see a computer being able to do that. Instinct or even a gut feeling just doesn’t work in the computer world. No matter how many calculations that they can perform, and even given that AI can learn, they just will not have the neural network to be able to do that. In addition to that, how do you program empathy? How can you have confidence in something that’s not real?

One more thing: How do you program, or in this case, teach a machine to ask why something doesn’t make sense? Riley can ask me that question a hundred times in a day, but a machine? How can they learn to do that?

For as something as complicated as this human body is, with trillions and more of interactions, we can use the best data possible. Let’s leave that to the machines because that’s what they can do. And other than cases where people are too remote to see a live doctor, let’s leave healthcare diagnosis and treatments to humans.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References: Fast Company. October 2019.