It's Not Lupus

Some doctors tried to see how ChatGPT would diagnosing sick kids.

What they got was an 83% error rate.

Tell me how this is not all snake oil again?

ChatGPT is still no House, MD.

While the chatty AI bot has previously underwhelmed with its attempts to diagnose challenging medical cases—with an accuracy rate of 39 percent in an analysis last year—a study out this week in JAMA Pediatrics suggests the fourth version of the large language model is especially bad with kids. It had an accuracy rate of just 17 percent when diagnosing pediatric medical cases.

The low success rate suggests human pediatricians won't be out of jobs any time soon, in case that was a concern. As the authors put it: "[T]his study underscores the invaluable role that clinical experience holds." But it also identifies the critical weaknesses that led to ChatGPT's high error rate and ways to transform it into a useful tool in clinical care. With so much interest and experimentation with AI chatbots, many pediatricians and other doctors see their integration into clinical care as inevitable.

The medical field has generally been an early adopter of AI-powered technologies, resulting in some notable failures, such as creating algorithmic racial bias, as well as successes, such as automating administrative tasks and helping to interpret chest scans and retinal images. There's also lot in between. But AI's potential for problem-solving has raised considerable interest in developing it into a helpful tool for complex diagnostics—no eccentric, prickly, pill-popping medical genius required.

In the new study conducted by researchers at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, ChatGPT-4 showed it isn't ready for pediatric diagnoses yet. Compared to general cases, pediatric ones require more consideration of the patient's age, the researchers note. And as any parent knows, diagnosing conditions in infants and small children is especially hard when they can't pinpoint or articulate all the symptoms they're experiencing.

For the study, the researchers put the chatbot up against 100 pediatric case challenges published in JAMA Pediatrics and NEJM between 2013 and 2023. These are medical cases published as challenges or quizzes. Physicians reading along are invited to try to come up with the correct diagnosis of a complex or unusual case based on the information that attending doctors had at the time. Sometimes, the publications also explain how attending doctors got to the correct diagnosis.

I've said it before, and I will say it again, the current LLM AIs are little more than an overhyped ELIZA program.

Well, I'm calling this as the next bubble, or, more accurately, the next fraud out of Silicon Valley.