Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

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People, especially in medical crises, are desperate for answers that they often can't get because their clinicians don't know. The illusion of an all-knowing guru who sounds like their doctor and tells them ANYTHING is extremely alluring. If you're waiting to hear back from a doctor about test results (which these days probably showed up on your online account the moment they were completed) can be agonizing.

Ok for pain in your shoulder it might not, but how about a woman with a lump in her breast waiting for the mammogram interpretation? How about someone trying to understand disturbing lab results? People are also often pushed these days to move through visits with doctors at a breakneck speed, but the AI will "hear you out" all day.

Part of this is a problem with the AI, part of it a problem with our healthcare systems, and part of it is simply human nature. If you think that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the rest weren't aware of this going in you must have very little faith in the intelligence of their members. It's not hard to imagine the future of LLM's should involve a hell of a lot of liability on the companies running it, but for now it's the Wild West.

> but how about

Whatever scenario you come up with my answer is the same.

As an adult I’d like to be able to choose what tools I use to learn about my condition regardless of how well it works or even if it’s likely to mislead me.

There’s risk in every aspect of life and we can’t baby proof everything.

>choose what tools I use to learn about my condition regardless of how well it works or even if it’s likely to mislead me.

Even if it "works" so poorly that you're not actually learning about your condition?

If it's helping you learn about your condition then sure I agree. The issue here is that's not really the case, it's giving you the illusion that you're learning about your condition while feeding you hallucinations and half-truths at best. A recent look at medical advice from these things showed they're no better than a coin flip.

So if you MUST have answers that are at most random guesses, I'd suggest saving a few bucks and asking a coin before flipping it.

The companies are 100% aware, yes, and so they did make quite a few changes over the years.

Current trend is that the models will try to explicitly steer you towards "asking better questions from your medical provider", rather than providing diagnoses. They do also evaluate whether something can actually be established rather than just listen and nod along. And so the "you must have very little faith in the intelligence of their members" goes right back against these failure mode ideas.

Now of course, given a sufficiently desperate person, they can probably torture anything they want to hear out of these models. But so can they out of actual people, so that's kind of a high bar. When you get to the point where people are willfully misreading a given piece of text, bets tend to be rather off.

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