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Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

The title bothers me. It suggests to me that "AI" is a single thing. If two guys are tested and turn out to be not that great at reading MRI images, should the headline be "Male radiologists miss nearly one-third of breast cancers"?

If it said "AI something", I'd be fine with it. It's a statement about that something, not about AI in general. Use it as an adjective (short for "AI-using" I guess?), not a noun.

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They will directly write that "Radiologists miss nearly one-third of breast cancers."

I trust the meaning of this article is just that it requires hospitals to rethink their decision to substitute all doctors today.

No hospital is deciding that. People have been testing whether we can replace radiologists with AI for over 10 years.

If they test someone with no background in radiology, they could even make the headline "Humans miss 50% of breast cancers"

I wouldn't miss any of them. "Idk what I'm looking at but click positive and let someone who does sort it out this is way too dangerous".

AI doesn't have that option yet.

> It suggests to me that "AI" is a single thing.

But it is. It's LLMs. There is no other "AI".

Haven't you read HN in the past 1-2 years?

There are more radiologists than AI models that read MRIs.

The amount doesn't really matter. What matters is the variance. There could be only 3 radiologists in the world that use different practices with 1% 10% and 50% error rates. It would be misleading to say "Radiologists miss 50% of diagnoses" based on one practice.

The assumption when gathering these statistics is that more or less you can average these out, but with AI you might have a model with literal 100% error rate or a model with a much lower error rate, and that changes a lot depending on the AI method its using.

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