Keeping Healthcare AI Safe and Effective

Hardly a day passes without a new study comparing the performance of artificial intelligence to human expertise, often with the computer having the edge. Doomsayers fear the loss of human expertise altogether, eliminating not only livelihoods but the evolving knowledge necessary to judge and improve the AI systems themselves.Don’t worry, say the doom doubters. AI isn’t really thinking — powerful chatbots are just trained to represent relationships between words and phrases. They create humanlike responses to your queries by guessing the next word based on the query itself and the answer it progressively builds. Therefore, say the doubters, human thinkers will always be essential in critical arenas like healthcare.While the principles underlying large language models may be simple, human thought is also simple when reduced to its biological mechanics. Trained on a significant slice of accumulated human knowledge, chatbots like GPT-4 exhibit — or convincingly simulate — humanlike reasoning abilities and vast contextual awareness.