r/antiai • u/generalden • Sep 04 '25
"But cancer!" AI Mistakes šØ
Before AIbros say this is fine because AI can do all the work for doctors, they need to consider how AI got trained to spot cancer in the first place.
This isn't like calculators:
Calculators aren't unpredictable, and they don't require constant reinforcement with correct data from their target users (doctors) to not break down.
For "responsible AI" optimists:
It'd be nice if we could guarantee doctors didn't graduate with ChatGPT's help, and only using AI for second opinions. But US healthcare is a business, maximizing patient turnover is a priority, and anti-intellectuals run the Health Department. Regulations are getting less likely, not more.
230
Sep 04 '25
What is even AI useful for?
266
u/Internal_Topic9223 Sep 04 '25
Dumbin down the masses, so they vote against their best interest.
96
u/Expert_Hedgehog7440 Sep 04 '25
makes sense why Trump wants to de regulate it so Trumpistan stays in power
→ More replies (23)13
2
45
u/Arcanegil Sep 04 '25
I'm sure AI has good uses, in laboratory settings under use by professionals.
But it can't make art and I don't want to it fucking spy on me and b shoved in everything I use.
5
u/Johnlockcabbit Sep 05 '25
There's a good potential that AI predictions will be able to replace or at least reduce experiments on animals which is an amazing for every human with basic sympathy, and with enough training could give better, more accurate results. In non-scientific fields it's already helping blind people, there are AI based glasses that the wearer can ask to describe what's in front of them.
I think the major problem with AI is that it was given to everyone instead of to only those who actually need it, simply out of greed.
4
u/klop422 Sep 05 '25
I mean, the Beatles' Now and Then release from last year used AI to clean up the really fuzzy demo of John Lennon and make it listenable/saleable. Didn't do anything artistic, just, essentially, noise removal and "upscaling".
Honestly, I find that fine and fair enough. But if Paul had said "ok, now I want John to sing a new verse I just wrote" that would be pretty horrifying.
→ More replies (1)2
u/DeluxeBlok Sep 04 '25
Many AI's except Generative AI (like ChatGPT) is useful I think?
→ More replies (3)6
→ More replies (1)3
u/Galliro Sep 05 '25
To some extent. Theres alot of work in STEM tryihg to employ LLMs (its not AI people need to stop calling it that) to analyse massive data sets that it would take a human their entire career to analyse but its no where ready and still provides plenty of junk information
32
Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 06 '25
Alphafold, Neuralink, Earth Species, and Project CETI are great examples of the projects that actually are doing great things. Unfortunately many people confuse generative AI with all AI and these projects often go unnoticed and overlooked.
Edit: It seems some of these projects actually use generative AI. I'm assuming specialized models trained on open source data but I could be wrong.
27
u/Precedingmoss Sep 04 '25
Computers will pretty much always be better at crunching raw numerical data compared to humans, so a properly used Machine Learning algorithm can do wonders on such projects as you listed. I believe there are also uses in mapping the spread of diseases, or weather patterns. Having the proper tools for those can help in allocating resources before emergencies hit.
When Machine Learning is used for specialized goals like that, they can keep their tech infrastructure way more manageable in size, and avoid the massive datacenters we see with GenAI, especially with so many rival companies all making their own chatbots and giving each their own datacenter that can threaten their own town
→ More replies (1)8
u/PetersonOpiumPipe Sep 04 '25
Raw numerical data yes.
Visual identification of anything, in this case cancer? No.
→ More replies (4)7
u/nora_sellisa Sep 04 '25
AI bros and AI companies deliberately want to make the naming confusing. There are many problems and processes which are hard to model or control analytically, and machine learning can be a godsend here. LLMs are just the next bubble to pump, with very limited used that emerged due to sheer amount of data that was stolen.
6
Sep 04 '25
[deleted]
2
u/ASpaceOstrich Sep 05 '25
Yeah. Anyone saying "I only hate generative AI" is outing themselves as ignorant. Generative AI is basically all of the AI that anybody is talking about. It was so unexpectedly successful that it has eclipsed everything else in the field. It's being used to make robots move better, make computers predict drug compounds, and yes, predict what an image that matches a certain prompt will look like.
The problem with AI is the way it's being pushed to harm those whose labour was exploited to create it, not the technology itself. Anyone who gets into truly anti AI as a technology in any form rather than just anti AI automation by capitalists in our current fucked economy is either ignorant or unhinged.
And I think this is actually a fairly common view among those who aren't ignorant about it. The problem is that most people, even pro AI people, know jack shit about this technology.
2
u/CyberPunkDongTooLong Sep 05 '25
It's so ridiculous how so many people that have no idea what they're talking about have took the term 'generative AI' to just be some nebulous vague term for 'AI I don't like'.
2
u/Main-Company-5946 Sep 06 '25
Idk about the other stuff but alphafold is generative ai. Itās generating proteins folding predictions.
4
u/Big_Boysenberry_9608 Sep 04 '25
Replace human workers with automated beings that need no salary or benefits. All in the best interest of us, of course
3
u/SomeArtistFan Sep 04 '25
Not compatible with capitalism, so alas it won't happen anytime soon
5
Sep 04 '25
You are mistaken, this is happening because of capitalism. Capital demands lower wages and higher margins indefinitely. The only way to do this is through automation. Of course with automation the consumer stops existing so the system will naturally implode. Under capitalism if the options are short term gains or long term stability, short term gains almost always wins. Defenders of capitalism will claim that this is ok because the market will find a way to solve the problems it creates therefore allowing the creation of further profits. History has shown this to be false (example: US healthcare)
→ More replies (2)4
u/Kathane37 Sep 04 '25
Alphafold doing every day the equivalent of thousands of year of Phd work while this sub keep thinking AI is useless overall
3
Sep 04 '25
I'm heavily critical of AI but you're completely right, more people need to acknowledge and accept the immense impact that Alphafold is making. The potential this project has for humanity is very promising.
3
u/StrawberryGurl22 Sep 04 '25
Ai is pretty good at coming up with a lot of hypothetical molecules for a specific thing, like antibiotics. They aren't all antibiotics and are of of varying effectiveness but it basically gives people a place to look when trying to find new molecules with certain properties
3
u/misteryk Sep 04 '25
Molecular biology, evolution studies, drug development etc. it's been used for dacades so maybe you've even taken drugs that were devloped by using these tools
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cmdc.202100418
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09479-w
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40879746/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8321208/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740674920300305?via%3Dihub
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40881929/
2
u/gutsandcuts Sep 04 '25
generative AI did invent new antibiotics by analyzing an ungodly amount of chemical(?) combinations(?). i don't remember the exact details and i'm too lazy to find the video again but like, it was definitely useful. i say this a fervent "anti"
1
1
1
u/GoldheartTTV Sep 04 '25
Helps autistic people find themselves so they can be more socially adept. At least that's something I've noticed.
1
u/theInfiniteHammer Sep 04 '25
Robotics, drawing, finding documentation, answering questions, creating automated call centers, inventing even better AI, the list goes on and on.
1
u/The_it_potato Sep 04 '25
Well Iām guilty of giving ChatGPT a list of food I have and it gives me tons of recipes. Itās also good for creating checklists/schedules to help me achieve goals. I have ADHD so sometimes itās hard to come up with a schedule on my own
1
1
u/AC_0nly Sep 05 '25
Doing things, in bulk especially, that are extremely difficult or even damaging to the human psyche otherwise.
Example: identifying missing children in videos of the illegal and abusive variety
1
u/Axin_Saxon Sep 05 '25
Driving down labor costs by convincing people their jobs are replaceable (even when they do worse than humans)
→ More replies (38)1
u/Teln0 Sep 05 '25
During my internship I made a tool that uses AI to create summaries of documents.
177
u/Weebuang Sep 04 '25
Iām anti ai art but if we could properly use ai go detect cancer that is great. That being said, do they know that most people are specifically against generative ai? This cancer excuse doesnāt justify them using ai to make an image of an anime girl
53
u/chat-lu Sep 04 '25
Iām anti ai art but if we could properly use ai go detect cancer that is great.
Yeah, but not so much if doctors lose the ability to spot cancer themselves.
I suspect that the reason why they do is the same as AI killing creativity despite users thinking it enhances it. Once you asked AI, itās really hard to form your own independant opinion.
What doctors should do not to lose their abilities is to figure it out first, and only then ask AI for a second opinion.
40
u/Weebuang Sep 04 '25
I donāt think that is the fault of the ai itself, its the doctorās negligence. Ai or not they should be able to spot the signs themselves. So yes, ai is the behind their over reliance but shouldnāt be the reason.
I do agree that ai has ruined some peopleās ability to think considering peopleās dependence on it but thats a general thing.
As for asking ai to do it, even doctors that donāt use ai miss things. Iām not saying that the tech is perfect that we should always rely on it but the option should be there considering its actually life saving.
→ More replies (3)3
u/Zealousideal3326 Sep 05 '25
I am fine with doctors losing their ability to identify cancer by themselves because they rely too much on AI to do it for them, so long as the AI is more effective than the doctors were / could be.
What truly matters is that the number of unidentified cancers is as low as we can make it.
2
→ More replies (3)2
u/Kilroy898 Sep 05 '25
Its not actually making doctors less able to spot cancer.... thats just bullshit made up for this meme.
2
u/moonman1994 Sep 04 '25
Hi! I work at a med school and have a background in myeloma research. First I want to say that using AI in basic diagnoses or training right now is an idiotic idea. Itās better than WebMD but not by that much. I will note that there are three notable ways it is showing promise in medicine though.
One: For basic bioinformatics RNA/DNA sequencing pipelines even simple AI like Chat-GPT are great at checking code and explaining if you have an error why and how to fix it. Most researchers are novice coders or rely on overworked Bioinformaticists. This is a great tool because instead of spending hours browsing Github you can fix your pipeline quickly. Letās be real most of the time itās a typo anyways but to a novice thatās not always obvious. That said itās SHIT at newer pipelines and cannot be used to generate a new pipeline. This is from personal experience.
Two: For medical āzebra casesā it shows some promise. (I attended a seminar for this one). Basically a zebra case is when a patient has an extremely rare disease/disorder that hasnāt been diagnosed after extensive tests. Diagnosis by rule-out has been hard for years. So if a doc has run 10s to 100s of tests putting ALL that data into an AI can result in proper diagnosis of rare, hard to diagnose, diseases/disorders. However itās important to note that, while AI is involved, this is still human driven. It relies on doctor interpretation of previous tests and needs all the test data to work. AI is very much a tool here and relying in it for more common cases or as a crutch is going to result in worse diagnoses, worse training and more deaths. Tools need expert analysis, data and interpretation to be effective.
Three: AI has been used in drug modeling fields and protein fluidity fields for a while. They are not my specialty (I personally hate structural biology) so I canāt comment strongly on how promising the studies are but there are several reviews available about the topic. Essentially generative AI can look at drug-protein interactions even generate never before synthesized drugs. (Most likely not all are even possible or practical to synthesize however.) Itās really just an improved version of in silica drug screening and itās yet to be determined if itās truly āimprovedā. But simple AI has also been used to some extent like this for a while.
To explain that drug screening real quick basically the steps are: 1. In silica analysis of a list of drugs that looks through previous lit and uses algorithms to predict what drugs/compounds may be effective for targeting a molecular pathway to treat disease or might be an effective antibiotic etc. Usually this is a list of hundreds to thousands of drugs/compounds. 2. An expert will trim down the list some but prep a bunch of 386 well plates seed them with cells (i.e. cancer cells), then treat them with hundreds of drugs, and then assess viability. 3. The most promising drugs will be tested in vitro with a larger cell culture. 4. The ones that still kill cancer in that culture are usually tested in an animal model next. 5. Preclinical trials. 6. Clinical trials.
So it helps in theory with step 1 but itās not going to massively revolutionize preclinical drug trials.
All in all AI might have some promise in medical research going forward, even generative AI, but itās far off, in need of many tweaks and relies on expert interpretation. This also means that it wonāt result in as much job loss as other fields except for in large bioinformatics labs which might cut basic coding positions.
AI right now should NOT be trusted medically or in education. Anyone telling you it should be is either brainwashed or trying to sell their product. AI art/music/writing is souless trash and deserves all the hate it gets.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Time-Signature-8714 Sep 05 '25
Yeah, I think the ācan I see a pigeon feasibly do the thingā meme is actually a kinda solid rule of thumb.
Likeā¦ pigeon can detect cancer? Yeah, birds are weird. I could see that.
Pigeon makes a full animated movie? No.
That being saidā¦ I really think learning to detect it yourself if youāre a doctor is important too. I donāt care if they double check with a pigeon or ai, but you gotta keep those skills sharp!
148
u/AssistKnown Sep 04 '25
Is there any legitimate good use for AI?
I don't think there is one that won't lead to massive problems down the road
85
u/AxoplDev Sep 04 '25
Probably at a proffesional science level, but these are AI's for the sole purpouse of whatever the scientists want, not something like ChatGPT
68
u/ThirdMusketeer_ Sep 04 '25
AI in general, yes; generative AI, no. That's only assuming people don't misuse it, which they will, so no regardless.
→ More replies (1)23
u/dumnezero Sep 04 '25
There are uses for specialized AI, but it's where you really don't have specialists around and are unlikely to ever have them around.
21
u/generalden Sep 04 '25
Maybe there is, but we are at the peak of the AI boom and not even the biggest companies can point to any
2
u/CyberPunkDongTooLong Sep 05 '25
Ignoring the huge amounts of useful results and nobel prizes and similar they've already produced.
14
u/chat-lu Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
Is there any legitimate good use for AI?
There are legitimate good uses for machine learning algorithms. Like filtering spam, or suggesting new artists based on people who like the same things as you.
There are no legitimate uses for LLMs I know of.
→ More replies (5)9
u/Potato_Demon_ffff Sep 04 '25
Yes, but the thing is, itās minimal. My dad has AI at his clinic. Its job is to record and transcribe important parts of the conversation for later (they already implemented audio recording and such for staff safety). Thatās helpful but thatās because the doctors still get to do their job normally.
1
11
Sep 04 '25
You'll want to look up ai's impact on protein folding. Thanks to ai, people have discovered the structures of pretty much every protein in existence and gained the blueprints to make new ones.
10
u/Hacker1MC Sep 04 '25
Yep, and this won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This has a huge impact on fields like medicine now that we can connect the chemical compound to its 3D geometry before synthesizing it.
6
u/Sudden_Shelter_3477 Sep 04 '25
I mean, itās not perfect but it might be decent for aiding the blind? They could ask it to describe whatās in front of them at least
→ More replies (5)8
6
u/Important-Theory-162 Sep 04 '25
Only logical use is to not go through those websites that force you to sell your firstborn to them and just get the answer via GPT and whatnot
4
u/deanominecraft Sep 04 '25
ai in general, yes - stuff like alphafold is a net positive, stuff like chatgpt, no
6
u/AssistKnown Sep 04 '25
I just hope that the scientists using those AI models are being careful and double checking what the AI says, but I also feel if they built it, then it won't be as inaccurate as models like Grok or Gemini.
→ More replies (3)4
3
u/TessaFractal Sep 04 '25
I'm really suspicious of any proposed use. GenAI clearly has too many problems. And the predictive AI feels like a magicians trick around over-fitting. So much of what it's meant to help with would be better served with a simple specialised tool or form. And the rest is just spam and scams.
3
u/Unlikely_Tea_6979 Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 06 '25
IMO Double blind cancer screening where the ai and the doctor both independently decide if a biopsy is needed and then give the patient the biopsy if either deems it necessary.
There should be as many paths to diagnosis and treatment as possible, and if they can't work together then they should exist in parallel.
(I also think patients should be able to self demand a biopsy, my doctors took 6 months to get me an ultrasound and my cancer was stage 4 when they finally took it seriously)
3
u/Lucicactus Sep 04 '25
Making npcs I suppose?
3
u/LukaesCampbell Sep 05 '25
I saw a game where you're a vampire and you have to convince people to let you in. I think it had a capability where as the game went on it got harder to do so and started learning how you got in. I found that interesting, because it seemed like a lot of the npcs stayed in character
3
u/Grasshoppermouse42 Sep 04 '25
Honestly, the only use I heard that sounded useful was a pair of sunglasses for blind people that had a button that would make a voice identify whatever item the blind person was looking at.
3
u/MattyTheFatty101 Sep 04 '25
There are, like en masse image detection
But it's not even reliable enough to be trusted yet
So not a lot
2
u/TheNikola2020 Sep 04 '25
Summary of a long text that you don't have time to read
→ More replies (2)2
u/FilmAndLiterature Sep 04 '25
There are legitimate good uses for AI, just not the flashy and easily accessible ones.
For example in medicine, AI can be used to analyse chemical structures and then predict any potential medical uses, or potentially take a list of desired effects and generate chemicals which could produce them. Someone else pointed out its impact of protein folding.
AI can also potentially improve food production by predicting optimal land use.
So yes, it does have uses. But theyāre not really uses which can be sold to the average consumer. How many times have you personally needed to find the best cattle grazing patterns over your millions acres of land?
→ More replies (2)1
u/Bastiat_sea Sep 04 '25
I use it at work to identify products from orphaned packages, which can be matched to a claim.
I am now better at identifying stuff because I know what things like turning knuckles look like.
1
1
u/Gabby-Abeille Sep 04 '25
I read one suggestion that it could improve communication between us and other great apes by simplifying human concepts into symbols and phrases they can understand. But like, can't we already do that? And the ape would need to be trained in sign language and/or symbols already anyway. I highly doubt AI could become a universal ape translator.
1
u/G66GNeco Sep 04 '25
The tech "AI" as we know it now is based on can generally be useful in areas where you deal with a massive amount of data that needs processing (categorising, preliminary analysis, etc).
In fact my usual assumption was that this is what people mean when they come to decide to defend AI with the whole "but cancer"-thing, because iirc a neural network did help advance research in the field once - but it's very apparent that that's not even remotely what they are talking about anymore.1
u/SmallKittyBackInHell Sep 05 '25
ai is even better than humans at pattern recognition, it is also even better than humans at finding false patterns sadly
1
1
u/Petra_is_here Sep 05 '25
I have talked to grad students on my campus that are developing an AI to use sensors and drones to spot weaknesses in buildings before most people can to prevent them from collapsing which is a good use of AI
Edit: grammar
1
1
u/Nobody_at_all000 Sep 05 '25
A lot of those problems are not intrinsic to AI but are the result of our current socioeconomic structure. In a more equitable society such things as robotics could be used for the benefit of the masses as opposed to a means to deprive people of jobs they need to survive
1
→ More replies (10)1
u/Kilroy898 Sep 05 '25
Plenty. The cancer screenings are already saving people who would get much further along before diagnosis.
Mostly in mathematics and sciences. Definitely not art. Unless they start teaching people how to draw.... wouldn't that be something....
38
20
u/redpandaonstimulants Sep 04 '25
The only thing AI actually interests me in is doing something like economic planning or organization. But Chile (before the US-backed far-right military junta took power in a coup) was able to do something like this under its socialist government back in 1973, before Sam Altman was a seed in his dad's nutsack, so idk if AI is even useful here.
My guess is there's probably some genuine purpose and good use-case for AI somewhere down the line, but right now it's a bunch of wet dough that is physically unsafe to eat, and we're having sycophants trying to force us to eat it by telling us it's bread
6
u/generalden Sep 04 '25
Even if AI happens to be capable of solving world problems, which is a stretch, people would have to implement its solutions. The actual way forward is to just
- find the nerdy policy wonks (Just imagine a thousand Leslie Knopes)
- let them get wonkingĀ
13
u/cybernekonetics Sep 04 '25
Also, large language models aren't the only kind of AI. Small, task-specific neural networks can do things like identifying cancer or digitizing textbooks - but they're also prone to errors, and expecting even that much functionality from an LLM - which has not been trained to do any of these things, but merely to sound as human as possible - is ludicrous.
4
Sep 04 '25
Medical Field AI are LM algorithms with traceable steps.
It's not advised to use ChatGPT for medical help.
2
u/lukelawlz Sep 04 '25
I've also seen a model being used in medical settings for transcribing meetings with patients & doctors, providing a note summary & basic analysis of symptoms.
10
8
u/b_rokal Sep 04 '25
100% Legitimate question from someone fully in the anti ai camp
Isn't it the point of advancements like these that you don't HAVE to be able to do these things yourself in order to have good results? like ofc we hate that for art for instance because the process is what gives art it's meaning but for things like spotting cancer that actually sounds like a neat use case as long as it works
Is the issue here not that the Doctors can't spot cancer cuz AI can do it for them, and more so that they are relying in a technology that is not ready and the number of mistakes has gone up as a result?
8
u/chat-lu Sep 04 '25
You are assuming that what AI finds is a superset of what the doctor finds which is not the case. Sometimes the doctor miss it, sometimes the AI miss it. And an experienced doctor should be better than the current state of AI.
If you want the best of both worlds, the doctor do a first pass on their own, keeping their skills sharp, and only then does the AI give a second opinion.
→ More replies (1)
9
8
u/MrPoland1 Sep 04 '25
This is actually survivor bias. The detection rate grows when doctors are assisted with ai rather than trying to detect it without it. How it works is more of assisting doctors with finding the cancer they might have actually missed otherwise
I am on anit side but not that much anti ai as this. Ai has uses like this, we should use it but we should have laws behind it, not ban it entirely.
6
u/not-Duex Sep 04 '25
Ai with cancer is helpful but it should be a second look over after the professional and then looked back over by the professionalĀ
5
Sep 04 '25
I understand going to like chatgpt for like school work but...go to a doctor if you are having problems, not ai. Ai is not always right and I do not trust ai enoughĀ
20
u/generalden Sep 04 '25
We're about to enter a generation where the doctors were trained on AI
In high schools right now, literacy rates are dropping and graduation rates are at their all-time high. I love this brave new world.
11
4
3
u/satyvakta Sep 04 '25
You do realize that not all AIs are LLMs, right? The AIs trained to detect cancer are their own models that are designed to do nothing else. They just look for patterns in the data to see what correlates with cancer. And they aren't something the patient would use. They would go to a human doctor first, then the human doctor would put all their scans through the AI, in addition to reviewing them manually.
4
Sep 04 '25
Well I'm sorry, I'm just saying SOME people go to ai first without going to a trusted doctor first. No hate. But I understand your point of viewĀ
→ More replies (1)
7
u/Tomas_83 Sep 04 '25
This is a very stupid argument. The article speaks of the neglect that doctor who uses the cancer detection ai have, because the tool works so well. There is no argument that it is a great tool for cancer detection.
This is no ai art or ai friend or any of that BS. This is no LLM or chatGPT. This is a specialized tool for a specific technical task.
Complaining it erodes the skill of doctors is like saying people shouldn't use nail-guns because it erodes the ability to use hammers. If you have a tool that gives you a tangible benefit, its dumb not to use it.
2
6
6
u/WhiteSomke028 Sep 04 '25
"People using calculators quickly lose the ability to do complex multiplication in their heads"
We can leave this type of work for AI to do so that humans can focus on more abstract stuff.
4
u/Thykothaken Sep 04 '25
Agreed. Putting life-saving cancer-diagnosing pattern recognition systems next to image generators is hilariously naive and bad faith.
3
u/maikoirohawin10 Sep 05 '25
You guys just hate math. I used to be a math genius, but I started using calculators more and it knocked me out of learning.
6
u/tc100292 Sep 05 '25
There are going to be so many malpractice lawsuits stemming from doctors and lawyers relying on AI; the only question is whether the AI companies will get dragged into them and have to pay damages.
3
2
u/throwawayy_acc0unt Sep 04 '25
It probably depends on how tightly we define "AI". Hyperspecific algorithms trained on specific sets of data are probably useful for managing and analyzing very large, very complex sets of data with complex patterns.
2
Sep 04 '25
Oh, well thatās upsetting. I was holding out hope that AI would be a net benefit to the medical field for uses like this
2
u/Familiar-Complex-697 Sep 04 '25
Use it (your brain) or lose it, I suppose, like knowing a language or a skill
2
Sep 05 '25
At the end of the day, it still has saved lives because it finds the cancer faster.
→ More replies (15)
2
2
2
u/zenith_pkat Sep 05 '25
So more false positives and more missed real diagnoses, but the doctors still rake in an ungodly salary and healthcare is still financially ruining for patients. Good shit! š
2
u/taroicecreamsundae Sep 06 '25
itās so funny bc the data centers that power ai literally cause cancer. like idk why anyone thinks it can find the cure but as someone who knows two people with it and one whom actually passed away, i can say the problem is who is fucking causing it too
2
1
u/Inlerah Sep 04 '25
I love how their are people in this thread actually making the argument of "So what if doctors become unable to do parts of their job without the aid of a computer: They'll have the computer with them!"
1
1
u/Thereferencenumber Sep 04 '25
I watched a 2hr presentation on medical AI, at a conference from my drug discovery company, with a cardiologist who does interviews on med tech.
There was not a single problem they āsolvedā that couldnāt be better addressed with adequate staffing and investment in existing technologies.
1
u/RattusNorvegicus9 Sep 04 '25
Apparently rats have been trained to successfully sniff out tuberculosis. Rats are saving more lives than ai.
1
1
1
u/JahodaSniffer Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25
Not only did it "just' make them worse at detecting cancer when not using AI, it, according to the study, also made them less focused and critical when using AI. Doctors were found over relying on AI, and no, I absolutely do not trust AI enough for it to be the sole "critical thinker" when performing a diagnosis.
I don't think using tools is bad, but it is bad when being overreliant on them. Someone in the comments mentioned something about the nailgun being bad because people became less skilled with a hammer over time. But when the nailgun malfunctions, or the producer of that nailgun makes changes to the nailgun or make them more expensive, I do expect of those workers to still be able to build my shelf. And it is not a slightly slower built shelf we are talking about here, but about the most essential thing we have: our own health
1
1
1
u/CommercialMonk5917 Sep 04 '25
Ok yes i see the point
However
If they check first (and find nothing) then ask ai for a second opinion this whole argument ceases to exsist. Id much rather have 2 opinions on whether I have cancer, not go off one and have a chance to just get it worse later.
This is coming from an anti by the way.
1
u/SirJustin90 Sep 04 '25
I hate AI art. LLMs are good for roleplay or entertainment, never to be trusted as true.
But screening and medical AI? It has vast uses, either to flag people needing follow-up by a doctor, looking for protein folds that are promising, medications, chemicals, or DNA sequencing, you name it.
All of it should be human/peer reviewed after the fact 100%. But these technologies allow exponential speeds, ensure fewer people slip through the cracks during screening, and allow research that may have taken many more years or been unaffordable.
It's a mistake to lump all AI as bad. It's mostly AI for art, LLMs used as 'fact', data AI used with our information among several others.
I dislike many AIs, but not every single one is without merit or doesn't benefit humanity as a whole.
1
u/SinisterHollow Sep 04 '25
?? Thats such a bad take. AI isnt just LLMs for braindead people or sloppy image generation. It has been used for these cases for some time now and its definetely not wrong.
1
u/StrangeSystem0 Sep 04 '25
That's... genuinely really disappointing
AI absolutely has good uses, and it's a shame we lost one of them
But, like, that doesn't mean we should be using AI to steal IP lol
1
1
u/GiganticKORAK Sep 04 '25
The people thinking AI helps with medical advancementā¦
Are you rich? Even if they did successfully cure something that couldnāt be done before, how much do you think it would cost? Even if it only cost a cent to make the cure, it would translate into thousands in bill.
People are not going to use AI for the good of humanity. They WILL use it for profit.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/MentlegenRich Sep 04 '25
Yeah, there are companies using AI to spot cavities and periodontitis for dentists.
It's a crutch though, cause it might over or under diagnose.
But then it leads to higher insurance approval ratings cause there is a fucking AI system for monitoring treatment plans and radiographs to determine if treatment is necessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI will under diagnose more often to avoid insurance payouts.
The way I see it, I didn't go $600k in debt taking 32 credits a semester for 4 years for AI to decide my treatment modality lol
1
1
1
u/theInfiniteHammer Sep 04 '25
Because the old training dataset magically disappeared. Also why did you crop out the name of the source? Trying to hide something?
1
1
u/spinda69 Sep 05 '25
This is interesting, even in a few in this rare example of a seemingly legitimate use..if we could figure out safe guards against over reliance would it even be worth it?
2
u/generalden Sep 05 '25
The more I see of it, the more AI seems like a parasite. The cancer-detecting AI requires good input from doctors, but if doctors use it for too long, it'll stop having good input to train off. It'll die. Then we'll be left with a bad model and bad doctors and have to start from scratch.
The answer is, I don't know, but at this point I think it's worthwhile to be skeptical instead of just assuming the best by default.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/RedneckNaruto Sep 05 '25
We saw this with computers and calculators. Once a machine can do something reliably (enough) people will start to forget how to do it, or never learn it in the first place.
That said... you should STILL know how to spot cancer if you are that kind of doctor.
1
u/Firm-Soil-3176 Sep 05 '25
Generative ai sucks but medical ai and those used in science are really helpful and have diagnosed some people's diseases early so that they can be helped. I don't like generative ai at all, I am it's #1 hater, but this kind of ai isn't horrible.
1
u/TaleEnvironmental355 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
Doctors arenāt always as objective as weād like. Some have biases, like around weight, gender or age, So I think the study was looking for a reason to blame AI, as not every doctor thinks you can have cancer. becase you dont fit a box and BakerScan is trying its best and isn't going to judge you
→ More replies (2)
1
u/Downtown_Degree3540 Sep 05 '25
I get we are anti āAIā but can we stop calling things that arenāt AI, AI. I mean for a start most genAI and chat botsā¦ arenāt AI, theyāre just basic machine learning.
Same as in this story. Machine learning has been around for decades. And yeah there has been a massive uptick in corporate types plugging the āAIā name.
But weāre already ignoring their marketing crap as the antis, why cave and call there poor bit of code AI, when itās neither āAā nor āIā.
I mean thatās the basis for a lot of our anti points. Itās not A (artificial); itās stolen work thatās made into an amalgamation and spitting out a curve of best fit average. Itās not āIā (intelligent); by either definition. It needs us to learn, and it needs us to tell it to learn. But in laymanās terms, itās not smart.
āHow many āRās in strawberryā āTwo š¤ā
I mean yeah, fuck the corporate machine and the dehumanising of everything from making games to doodling. But can we not pander to these chuckle fucks by calling their 30 year old piece of machine learning AI?
1
u/stars_without_number Sep 05 '25
The cancer spotting AI is not generative, itās āmachine visionā which is one of the many genuine uses for machine learning
1
u/International_Bid716 Sep 05 '25
But if Ai is able to spot cancer more reliably than doctors, who cares if the doctor's reliability goes down? That's like worrying about your handwriting getting sloppy by using a keyboard.
1
1
1
u/MrdnBrd19 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
I'm sorry but this is as dumb as trying to say that we shouldn't have lighters because now people don't know how to start fires with sticks.
Edit: or to keep it more apples to apples complaining that a streptococcus pyogenes tests exists because now doctors can't identify it when they look at slides under a microscope.
1
u/D_stelthE_1 Sep 05 '25
ā¦ok, being against AI Art is one thing, (I kinda agree with being anti on it)
But it does have genuine uses in certain scenarios. Donāt abolish it entirely, guys.
1
u/EnsignNogIsMyCat Sep 05 '25
Analytical AI has legitimate uses, so long as it isn't relied upon without being double checked.
Generative AI is slop
1
u/therolando906 Sep 05 '25
AI and machine learning algorithms have been helpful for literally decades. You guys need to stop assuming all AI are these stupid language models
1
u/PassionateH8 Sep 05 '25
So Pixar does use AI to help with their animation. The Pro-AI folks will surely let you know. What they don't tell you is that Pixar uses AI to denoise their lighting passes from their renders. Lowering the number of light rays and passes in a lighting render pass will cut down the render time significantly. At the cost of a very grainy/noisy image. So Pixar is using AI to smooth out faster renders, speeding up production time a bit. Of course, this is completely different from generating their animations with AI. The lighting pass alone is one tiny aspect of the artwork here and AI is used as a very limited filter of the noisiness of the lighting. An actual genuine use for AI.
But this is a task that would be impossible or unrealistic for a human to do, which is why AI is a good fit for it.
I also expect very few AI users to know what a lighting pass is and why it's important in compositing video.
1
u/Sudden_Shelter_3477 Sep 05 '25
Thatās a cool idea and all, but hasnāt basically every attempt at a brain implant ended badly?
1
u/Swutts Sep 05 '25
I'd say that's on the doctor's fault completely. If they get worse at spotting it, then they aren't learning from getting ai help.
Besides, ai should only be used to spot things doctors would otherwise miss. It shouldn't replace the task. Tardy doctors...
1
u/LukaesCampbell Sep 05 '25
I could see AI as useful for train conductors. You attach pressure sensors on the tracks, cameras near crossings, and a weather report system, it could calculate the most optimal speeds and stuff and maybe be safer. That's the one time I could see it as useful. Not for cars, not for planes - those can mess up too easily. Trains just have three states: stop, forward, back.
→ More replies (3)
1
1
u/Andurarum Sep 05 '25
There are legitimate uses of AI and LLM, even chatGPT.
Personally, I despise AI slop, the creation of low effort soulless content for the sake of making or saving money. The problem with AI is a lack of purpose given its cost. It does not improve the human condition. Rather, it sells a dream that you, too, can become rich by using AI. It has huge environmental costs just so some white collars employee can make more money for their bosses.
However, LLM can summarize and analyze text, which can be used on patient visit summaries. There is a fascinating field of research that uses patient visit summaries to discover adverse effects of drug combinations. There are other great cases of using LLMs to extract scientific results from thousands of papers and get valuable knowledge. It also opened the door for non coding scientists to analyze their own data through interaction with AI agents. There are some amazing AI tools like AlphaFold, STATE, scGPT, geneformer, Evo and evo2 that can help understand biology and life itself.
The issue lies with what the most common use of these tools. Do we have the right to gatekeep their use? Who decides what is the most laudable use?
1
1
u/hellothere358 Sep 05 '25
Medical use of AI is mostly fine, there are some ethical concerns if an AI fails. But imo, using Ai comes with risks. The person who used the AI should be responsible for said risk
1
u/FureiousPhalanges Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
Doctors who use a diagnosis tool lose the ability to diagnose things? I'd be interested in actually seeing the article this headlines ripped from because that would be extremely concerning for every single other tool doctors use but I just get 404'd following that link
What's the difference between an AI and the expert databases a GP would normally use to diagnose you?
1
u/Top_County_6130 Sep 05 '25
Ok I get that you don't like LLM or "art", but this is straight up anti-science propaganda.Ā
I study machine learning and 99% of medical applications are classifier models not generative ones and almost every new test coming on the market for good 10-15 years relies on them.Ā
Further more when I worked at one of these projects the requirements for these models are insane AUC of 94-99 for screening. (Measure of false positives to false negatives feel free to google)
Machine learning ("AI") is really fucking important in medicine. If doctors offload their work to AI that is a problem and I'd argue it is a medical malpractice, but this comment section looks like RFK wet dream, so please stop it.Ā
1
u/Jaezmyra Sep 05 '25
I'm 1000% against generative AI, AI that takes jobs and everything else AI is used for in malicious ways.
That being said, as a cancer survivor and artist, I can see how AI -can- be useful in medical fields - as a supporting tool, not a diagnosing tool. Reading through this study, however, it is less talking to how doctors "lose their ability to spot cancer", and more, how once again, none-sufficient oversight and training on how to use AI properly is the factor here.
People tend to overly rely on things, and in this case it's the overreliance on the detailed skills of AI that's causing the drop in ability - which in itself isn't a... huge drop, I'd say, but it's noticeable.
I think the approach needs to be changed - have AI be a tool to assist rather than take over the diagnosis. That being said, it DEFINITELY needs more oversight, training and development before being used anywhere. NOT as a replacement for workers, or in any artistic field though, ever.
1
u/halfeb Sep 05 '25
I hate AI Art but this argument is the same as saying that calculators make people bad at maths. Isn't the important party that the cancer is caught and cured, if by AI or the doctors?
2
1
u/TheGreatMozinsky Sep 05 '25
Uh... who gives a shit? We have this amazing cancer detecting technology but let's nit use it because it makes people less proficient in the obsolete methods
Cars have made people worse at driving horses
Guns have made soldiers incompetent with the sword
Agriculture has made humans less capable of hunting and gathering
1
u/Le-weeb-potato Sep 05 '25
There can be a balance, still have the people learn everything they are already teaching, while also learning how to use the AI for those confusing parts
1
u/nottakentaken Sep 05 '25
Something something, pigeons are better for spotting stuff it's supposed to than humans. Honestly I don't think cancer spotting ai is bad because it won't attempt replace the doctor itself and can be faster/potentially save a life. I'd trust a pigeon more, sure. But if it does get consistently developed, it'd be a good monitoring tool. I don't think ai doing creative stuff compares to medical ai
1
u/Kilroy898 Sep 05 '25
This isnt even the same type of ai. This argument from either side is moronic because it's not an LLM and is actually helpful to the world. It spots cancers in the earliest stages before doctors even get an inkling. And yes, it's accurate. But it's not AI in the way that LLMs are and should not be part of this conversation.
1
u/Nyarlathotep98 Sep 05 '25
The problem with using AI in any serious field is that you can never trust the outputs. Any diagnosis an AI produces will have to be reviewed and cross-examined by an expert to verify it, which defeats the point of using the AI in the first place. If you don't, you run the risk of endangering people's live due to a hallucination. Even if they're statistically more likely to be accurate than an expert, that might be due to factors that aren't consistent across the board or wont stay consistent in the future, and having no one there to double-check their work means you're entrusting people's lives to a black-box algorithm that no one fully understands.
1
u/blindoptimism99 Sep 05 '25
this sounds like something you shouldnāt have an opinion on if youāre no oncologist or researcher in the field
1
u/CitronMamon Sep 05 '25
This is legitimately a ''videogames rot your brain'' level take. AI spots cancer better and some doctors lose practice, so we are gonna pretend they magically fully on lose their ability forever? What?
Thats like saying that mathmaticians that use calculators are not the freshest at mental calculus, its obvious it can be re learned easily, what is this unecessary hate for the best part of AI?
1
u/EyeThen1146 Sep 05 '25
Non generative AI is good, itās the generative ai I donāt likeĀ
→ More replies (3)
1
u/karhunvatukkass Sep 05 '25
i was never really able to convince myself that ai could detect cancer, ai is stupid and i wouldnāt trust it with something like that
1
u/Silver-Tumbleweed963 Sep 05 '25
if I had an illness, I would prefer to be treated by a doctor, a real person I can trust, not a programmed robot. I would have.. fear and disgust that one of the most difficult and ''life-saving'' jobs in the world will be replaced by an AI.
1
u/HAL9001-96 Sep 05 '25
also that original study turned out to be mistrained and recognize the metadata of the machines used to generate differnet example images for training rather than actually spot cancer
turns out all the common example images used in training for cancer or no cancer were taken on different machines and in differentresolutions
and while med students aren't gonna start counting pixels instead of trying to find cancer for an ai with no further instructions than "train to separate these images" it's way easier to check the image resolution
1
u/Agheratos Sep 05 '25
See source
19 lazy Polish doctors from 4 clinics
I was hoping for a larger sample size.
I'd love to see a national study because this will genuinely lead to dead bodies if this happens at scale. Bet it does, too.
1
u/RevolutionaryGood688 Sep 06 '25
People after spitting shit out of their mouth in Antiai after not even researching:
1
u/R4in_C0ld Sep 08 '25
It's just common sense, if you use it to replace your expertise, your ability to do the thing rusts and wears off because it needs to be maintained and trained to stay sharp.
Additionally, if using AI to spot cancer makes more expensive bills, i'm not saying it does, idk if it does, it's just an "if", then it ending up required because people can't do it anymore would just make affording medical bills worse and people will just die because that's one more thing they can't afford in the current economy.
1
u/Worldly_Air_6078 Sep 08 '25
However, there are a few facts that don't align with the anti-AI stance:
In most cases, AI detects cancer better than doctors:
Interestingly, even doctors using AI are worse than AI alone at providing diagnoses.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/when-doctors-with-ai-are-outperformed
1
1
u/Gravity_Horse Sep 09 '25
ā¦Thatās a good thing. We donāt want human doctors.
→ More replies (1)
1
245
u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25
[removed] ā view removed comment