A study in The Lancet threw some refreshingly cold water on the AI hype train after finding that healthcare’s shiny new models might be de-skilling physicians.
Here’s the setup. Researchers tracked four Polish health centers that gave their gastroenterologists AI to help spot polyps during colonoscopies before yanking it away after three months.
- Long story short, the doctors’ ability to detect polyps plummeted 6% below baseline following the AI rugpull.
- Unassisted polyp detection rates fell from 28.4% before the AI teaser to 22.4% after, raising concerns that relying on AI might rob physicians of hard-won skills.
Sounds familiar. The findings echo a recent MIT preprint that showed that people who used AI to write essays used less of their brains and had worse recall of their writing than those who mustered up the words on their own.
- That’s probably not a shocker to anyone that’s used ChatGPT for more than five minutes, but it’s easy to see that it might spell trouble when applied to medicine.
- If gastroenterologists start leaning on AI to detect polyps, what happens if they lose their ability to detect them without it?
Right idea, wrong question. People were better at mental math before they had calculators, but that doesn’t mean society would be better off without them. The question we have to ask ourselves is, which skills are we willing to lose?
- Gastroenterologist Dr. Spencer Dorn nails it: AI doesn’t just risk de-skilling doctors in polyp detection, it risks diminishing their overall critical thinking skills.
- “My real concern is not the technical skills we can afford to lose, but the foundational ones we can’t: critical thinking, sound judgment, and compassionate care. These aren’t just important to preserve – they’re irreplaceable.”
The Takeaway
If doctors keep outsourcing their thinking to AI, it could be a one-way ticket to a world where Dr. GPT is the only one patients can turn to. Seems dystopian, but is it really that bad if it also means better outcomes for those patients?
