10 questions about AI and medicine

Can AI diagnose illnesses?

The AI Will See You Now - Wall Street Journal

Can AI spot lung cancer years in advance?

AI tool could help spot lung cancer years in advance – Washington Post

Can AI answer your medical questions?

ChatGPT Will See You Now: Doctors Using AI to Answer Patient Questions - Wall Street Journal

ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate empathetically with patients – New York Times

Can AI write medical papers?

A Doctor Published Several Research Papers With Breakneck Speed. ChatGPT Wrote Them All - Digg

Can AI save someone’s voice?

Patients were told their voices could disappear. They turned to AI to save them - Washington Post  

Can AI predict medical outcomes?

The algorithm has been trained to make medical predictions based on reading genomes - Washington Post  

Can AI find new medicines?

Scientists have used AI to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug - BBC

Can AI spot cancer?

AI Tool Assists in Predicting the Likelihood of Pancreatic Cancer - Healthy Analytics

What role will AI play in medicine?

For now, the new AI in health care is going to be less a genius partner than a tireless scribe - New York Times

What limitations are we seeing for AI operating in the medical space?

An AI Diagnosed Her with Breast Cancer. Then She Ran an Experiment to See How Accurate It Was - The Markup

From “Dunce” to Genius

When Victor Serebriakoff was fifteen, his teacher told him he would never finish school and that he should drop out and learn a trade. Victor took the advice and for the next seventeen years he was an itinerant doing a variety of odd jobs. He had been told he was a "dunce" and for seventeen years he acted like one. When he was 32 years old, an amazing transformation took place. An evaluation revealed that he was a genius with an I.Q. of 161. Guess what? That's right, he started acting like a genius. Since that time he has written books, secured a number of patents and has become a successful businessman. Perhaps the most significant event for the former dropout was his election as chairman of the International Mensa Society. The Mensa Society has only one membership qualification, an I.Q. of 140.

The story of Victor Serebriakoff makes you wonder how many geniuses we have wandering around acting like dunces because someone told them they weren't too bright. Obviously, Victor did not suddenly acquire a tremendous amount of additional knowledge. He did suddenly acquire tremendous added confidence. The result was, he instantly became more effective and more productive. When he saw himself differently, he started acting differently. He started expecting, and getting different results. Ah yes, as a man thinketh…

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Attitude

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past . . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes.

Charles R. Swindoll

Close a few doors

We can spend a lot of energy keeping doors open. Time is wasted when we refuse to let go because of the pain of watching a door close and seeing an option disappear. We pay a price to avoid feeling a particular emotion such as losing an opportunity. Find ways to avoid overbooking our lives by letting a few things fall off our plates. Cancel projects. Give away ideas to colleagues. Resign from committees. Rethink hobbies. Let a few doors close.

Stephen Goforth

A way to spot genuine love

We don’t keep pets around very long when they protest or fight back against us. The only school to which we send our pets for the development of their minds or spirits is obedience school. Yet it is possible for us to desire that other humans develop a “will of their own;” indeed, it is this desire for the differentiation for the other that is one of the characteristics of genuine love.

In our relationship with pets we seek to foster their dependency. We do not want them to grow up and leave home. We want them to stay put, to lie dependably near the hearth. It is their attachment to us rather than their independence from us that we value in our pets.

This matter of the “love” of pets is of immense import because many, many people are capable of “loving” only pets and incapable of genuinely loving other human beings.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

24 articles worth reading about the dangers of AI (beyond security issues)

Assessing the existential risk of AI - MIT Tech Review  

Intelligence analysts confront the reality of deepfakes: AI-generated image of fake Pentagon explosion just an inkling of what’s to come - Space News

The potential dangers of using artificial intelligence as a weapon of war - NPR  

India’s religious AI chatbots are speaking in the voice of god - Rest of World

AI-generated child sex images spawn new nightmare for the web - Washington Post 

Princeton computer science professor says don't panic over 'bullshit generator' ChatGPT - Business Insider  

Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified - Vice

Calm Down. There is No Conscious A.I. - Gizmodo

AI can be racist, sexist and creepy. What should we do about it? - CNN

The case for slowing down AI - Vox 

More than 1,000 tech leaders & researchers call for a six-month moratorium on AI development over “risks to society and humanity.” - New York Times

Claudia offers nude photos for pay but is a fake AI creation - Washington Post

If Wikipedia content is AI-generated, (it could create) a feedback loop of potentially biased information, if left unchecked - Vice   

2024 promises to be the first AI election cycle with artificial intelligence potentially playing a pivotal role at the ballot box - USA TODAY 

Why Hollywood Really Fears Generative AI - Wired

How AI is already changing the 2024 election - Axios

Chatbots have faced criticism for messing up key historical facts, fabricating sources, and citing misinformation about each other - Columbia Journalism Review

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says Government Intervention Is 'Crucial' - Entrepreneur

The internet is filled with videos promising AI can make you rich. But there is little evidence to prove it can - Washington Post

What happens when AI becomes so integrated into our daily decision-making that we become dependent on it? - Inside Higher Ed

ChatGPT Is Cutting Non-English Languages Out of the AI Revolution—threatening to amplify existing bias in global commerce and innovation - Wired

Will AI replace coders? - The Guardian

U.S. Grapples With Potential Threats From Chinese AI - Wall Street Journal

Researchers failed to identify one-third of medical journal abstracts as written by AI - Bioxiv

Why AI Will Make Our Children More Lonely - Wall Street Journal 

Love hurts—really!

Heartache can have the same effect as someone spilling hot coffee on us.

Imaging scans show the same parts of the brain light up for physical pain as when you are separated from a loved one or have a broken heart, say researchers at the University of Michigan. They asked 40 people who had a recent unwanted romantic breakup that gave them feelings of rejection to look at a photo of their former partner to think about the relationship. The brain scans taken during this and other similar situations were compared to scans when subjects were given slight pain. The similarities in the brain scans suggest a close connection between our minds and our bodies. The painful emotions that come with feeling socially rejected can scar us in more than one way. The sting of heartbreak and rejection can make us physically ill. Our social well-being is a critical part of maintaining a healthy life.

Is there someone you’ve cast aside with a harsh word or a loved one who has had to endure a negative attitude from you? Those actions are not that far removed from physically hurting that person.

Details of the study are in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Stephen Goforth

Hearty Laughter

A good belly laugh has a rallying effect that no chuckle can match. A British study in 2011 showed that, like sex and exercise, the physical effort of uncontrollable laughter makes our brains release chemicals called endorphins, which relax us and relieve pain. It is “the emptying of the lungs that causes” the feel-good effect, not just the thought of something funny, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar tells BBCNews.com.

He and his colleagues at Oxford University asked volunteers to watch either a comedy or a documentary, and then applied painful levels of cold or pressure to their arms. The volunteers who had laughed hard during their videos could withstand 10 percent more pain than those who’d only giggled or who hadn’t been amused at all.

The Week Magazine

8 good quotes about students cheating with AI   

Is it cheating to use AI to brainstorm, or should that distinction be reserved for writing that you pretend is yours? Should AI be banned from the classroom, or is that irresponsible, given how quickly it is seeping into everyday life? Should a student caught cheating with AI be punished because they passed work off as their own, or given a second chance, especially if different professors have different rules and students aren’t always sure what use is appropriate? Chronicle of Higher Ed 

What about students cheating by using ChatGPT instead of doing their own writing? The thing about technology is that it is interfering with the very weak proxies we have of measuring student learning, namely homework and tests. (Generative AI) is just another reminder that it’s actually really hard to know how much someone has learned something, and especially if we’re not talking to them directly but relying on some scaled up automated or nearly automated system to measure it for us. MathBabe Cathy O’Neil

Sometimes, though, professors who felt they had pretty strong evidence of AI usage were met with excuses, avoidance, or denial. Bridget Robinson-Riegler, a psychology professor at Augsburg University, in Minnesota, caught some obvious cheating (one student forgot to take out a reference ChatGPT had made to itself) and gave those students zeros. But she also found herself having to give passing grades to others even though she was pretty sure their work had been generated by AI (the writings were almost identical to each other). Chronicle of Higher Ed 

As professors of educational psychology and educational technology, we’ve found that the main reason students cheat is their academic motivation. The decision to cheat or not, therefore, often relates to how academic assignments and tests are constructed and assessed, not on the availability of technological shortcuts. When they have the opportunity to rewrite an essay or retake a test if they don’t do well initially, students are less likely to cheat. The Conversation

Lorie Paldino, an assistant professor of English and digital communications at the University of Saint Mary, in Leavenworth, Kan., described how she asked one student, who had submitted an argument-based research essay, to bring to her the printed and annotated articles they used for research, along with the bibliography, outline, and other supporting work. Paldino then explained to the student why the essay fell short: It was formulaic, inaccurate, and lacked necessary detail. The professor concluded with showing the student the Turnitin results and the student admitted to using AI. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Our research demonstrates that students are more likely to cheat when assignments are designed in ways that encourage them to outperform their classmates. In contrast, students are less likely to cheat when teachers assign academic tasks that prompt them to work collaboratively and to focus on mastering content instead of getting a good grade. The Conversation

A common finding (from our survey): Professors realized they needed to get on top of the issue more quickly. It wasn’t enough to wait until problems arose, some wrote, or to simply add an AI policy to their syllabus. They had to talk through scenarios with their students. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Matthew Swagler, an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College, had instituted a policy that students could use a large language model for assistance, but only if they cited its usage. But that wasn’t sufficient to prevent misuse, he realized, nor prevent confusion among students about what was acceptable. He initiated a class discussion, which was beneficial: “It became clear that the line between which AI is acceptable and which is not is very blurry, because AI is being integrated into so many apps and programs we use.”  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Thoughtful discourse on college campuses

The capacity to entertain different views is vital not only on a college campus but also in a pluralistic and democratic society. With shouting matches replacing thoughtful debate everywhere, from the halls of Congress to school-board meetings, a college campus might be the last, best place where students can learn to converse, cooperate, and coexist with people who see the world differently. 

The University of Chicago famously enshrined this principle in a 2014 report by a faculty committee charged with articulating the university’s commitment to uninhibited debate. “It is not the proper role of the university,” the Chicago Principles read, “to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” 

Daniel Diermeier writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Struggling for Knowledge

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. the study’s sample of American students, on the other hand, spend less than one percent of their time in that state.

 “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who co-wrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the (Japanese) teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.”

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

30 Great Quotes about AI & Education

ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content. The tool seems more beneficial for those who already have a lot of experience writing–not those learning how to develop ideas, organize thinking, support propositions with evidence, conduct independent research, and so on. Critical AI

The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?” The Atlantic

The reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? New York Times 

The student who is using it because they lack the expertise is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

It used to be about mastery of content. Now, students need to understand content, but it’s much more about mastery of the interpretation and utilization of the content. Inside Higher Ed

Don’t fixate on how much evidence you have but on how much evidence will persuade your intended audience. ChatGPT distills everything on the internet through its filter and dumps it on the reader; your flawed and beautiful mind, by contrast, makes its mark on your subject by choosing the right evidence, not all the evidence. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better. Chronicle of Higher Ed

A.I. will force us humans to double down on those talents and skills that only humans possess. The most important thing about A.I. may be that it shows us what it can’t do, and so reveals who we are and what we have to offer. New York Times

Even if detection software gets better at detecting AI generated text, it still causes mental and emotional strain when a student is wrongly accused. “False positives carry real harm,” he said. “At the scale of a course, or at the scale of the university, even a one or 2% rate of false positives will negatively impact dozens or hundreds of innocent students.” Washington Post

Ideas are more important than how they are written. So, I use ChatGPT to help me organize my ideas better and make them sound more professional. The Tech Insider

A.I. is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional. New York Times 

We surpass the AI by standing on its shoulders. You need to ask, ‘How is it possibly incomplete?’” Inside Higher Ed

Our students are not John Henry, and AI is not a steam-powered drilling machine that will replace them. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to surpass technology. Inside Higher Ed

These tools can function like personal assistants: Ask ChatGPT to create a study schedule, simplify a complex idea, or suggest topics for a research paper, and it can do that. That could be a boon for students who have trouble managing their time, processing information, or ordering their thoughts. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If the data set of writing on which the writing tool is trained reflects societal prejudices, then the essays it produces will likely reproduce those views. Similarly, if the training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Inside Higher Ed

Students may be more likely to complete an assignment without automated assistance if they’ve gotten started through in-class writing. Critical AI

Rather than fully embracing AI as a writing assistant, the reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed

“I think we should just get used to the fact that we won’t be able to reliably tell if a document is either written by AI — or partially written by AI, or edited by AI — or by humans,” computer science professor Soheil Feizi said. Washington Post

(A professor) plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.New York Times

ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking. MIT Tech Review

Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes and motivations for using these tools, as well as the impact AI has on their learning and writing. Inside Higher Ed 

Discuss students’ potentially diverse motivations for using ChatGPT or other generative AI software. Do they arise from stress about the writing and research process? Time management on big projects? Competition with other students? Experimentation and curiosity about using AI? Grade and/or other pressures and/or burnout? Invite your students to have an honest discussion about these and related questions. Cultivate an environment in your course in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Barnard College 

We will need to teach students to contest it. Students in every major will need to know how to challenge or defend the appropriateness of a given model for a given question. To teach them how to do that, we don’t need to hastily construct a new field called “critical AI studies.” The intellectual resources students need are already present in the history and philosophy of science courses, along with the disciplines of statistics and machine learning themselves, which are deeply self-conscious about their own epistemic procedures. Chronicle of Higher Ed

We should be telling our undergraduates that good writing isn’t just about subject-verb agreement or avoiding grammatical errors—not even good academic writing. Good writing reminds us of our humanity, the humanity of others and all the ugly, beautiful ways in which we exist in the world. Inside Higher Ed 

Rather than trying to stop the tools and, for instance, telling students not to use them, in my class I’m telling students to embrace them – but I expect their quality of work to be that much better now they have the help of these tools. Ultimately, by the end of the semester, I'm expecting the students to turn in assignments that are substantially more creative and interesting than the ones last year’s students or previous generations of students could have created. We Forum 

Training ourselves and our students to work with AI doesn’t require inviting AI to every conversation we have. In fact, I believe it’s essential that we don’t.  Inside Higher Ed

If a professor runs students’ work through a detector without informing them in advance, that could be an academic-integrity violation in itself.  The student could then appeal the decision on grounds of deceptive assessment, “and they would probably win.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

How might chatting with AI systems affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental-health challenges? Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Are we going to fill the time saved by AI with other low-value tasks, or will it free us to be more disruptive in our thinking and doing? I have some unrealistically high hopes of what AI can deliver. I want low-engagement tasks to take up less of my working day, allowing me to do more of what I need to do to thrive (thinking, writing, discussing science with colleagues). Nature