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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what's ChatGPT-specific here; patients discovering their own diseases has happened a lot since the internet has gone mainstream. Google has been the most prolific doctor of the 21st century. The only comparison given is

> But both seem to work better than the average symptom checker or Google as a diagnostic tool. “It’s a super high-powered medical search engine,” Beam says.

Which is, arguably, more of an indictment of how bad Google's search capabilities are in 2023 than anything else.

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Bizarre take.

  Not sure what's ChatGPT-specific here

They literally used ChatGPT, specifically.

You may as well hear the story of William Kamkwamba building a wind turbine for his village and say "Not sure what's African-village specific here. People have been building wind turbines all over the world with various resources."

Assuming they meant “couldn’t you already do this with Google” I think the big difference is the context length. You can describe way more symptoms, and include a lot more data, than you ever could in a single search query. Even if Google worked properly, in its current form it’s just not capable of parsing pages of info and drawing conclusions beyond keywords.

A more apt comparison would be seeing one of the many "we rewrote our Python app in Go and improved performance by 100x" articles, and pointing out that most of the improvement comes from the rewrite and not the language.

Similarly, the real moral of the article is that doctors miss things and doing independent research, whether that's ChatGPT, Google, Bing, Yandex, or reading research papers yourself is sometimes necessary.

Interesting, the way I interpret what you're saying is "Obviously ChatGPT can make an accurate medical diagnosis" in the same way of "Obviously a Python app can be rewritten in Go"

Go has been around for quite a while now. ChatGPT relatively has not. If Go was still quite new and people were unsure of it, then your article headline actually does makes sense.

For people such as myself, it is not obvious that ChatGPT could do such things, hence the headline is useful context.

No that's absolutely not the same as python rewritten as Go. Not just that most ordinary people don't have access to arcane medical knowledge which are hidden behind paywalls or just not available to public, arriving at a diagnosis that 17 doctors missed before from just MRI notes is not a trivial thing that can be done by just "independent research". It's absolutely disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

It's not bizarre at all. Tons of people are in denial of the capabilities of chatgpt. The current strategy is to position it as nothing more than an advanced search engine.

Clearly chatGPT has flaws. Clearly it's more than a search engine. And clearly there's a large contingent of people who don't want to think it's anything more than a search engine. Probably was Bizarre when the hype first started but now these people in denial are a dime a dozen, as cliche as the people they want to bring down.

Google is like going to an individual doctor which this mother was doing already.

ChatGPT synthesized its result from multiple sources and communicated that - no source existed which understood the connections between various symptoms. This is exactly the thing that the mother was quoted at one point - every doctor was looking at things from their specialization and not holistically.

> ChatGPT synthesized its result from multiple sources and communicated that - no source existed which understood the connections between various symptoms.

Is this true? Or is the source that had all of the symptoms buried under WebMD/MayoClinic SEO spam?

Health info on google was captured by the likes of webmd and healthline 20 years ago and they've just been farming their seo position ever since, absolutely no innovation, just regurgitating medical literature 101.

But it really feels like Google's entire ecosystem is collapsing rapidly as seo bots cannibalize it. Ad-supported content is a local optima that LLMs will thankfully destroy.

> ... patients discovering their own diseases has happened a lot since the internet has gone mainstream...

With, of course, a corresponding increse in patients thinking they've discovered their own diseases.

For every "ChatGPT diagnosed my rare illness" story there's a "the Internet helped me find a bunch of people who are certain I've got Morgellons and chronic lyme".

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