1115
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
1115 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
86957 readers
3633 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can't vouch for that other person's anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you're curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
@joe @Snapz
> The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
This is demonstrably untrue.
AI tends to increase dangerous racial bias in healthcare.
- https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/healthcare-bias-in-ai-a-systematic-literature-review/
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5C_id=3747737
- https://tech4future.info/en/algorithmic-discrimination-healthcare/
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-022-00590-8
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40615-024-02237-0
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231213820
- https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(24)00321-5
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01746-4
@joe @Snapz AI is dangerously unreliable in a clinical setting and often provides dangerous medical advice in and out of clinical settings.
- https://futurism.com/typo-ai-doctor-haywire
- https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260
- https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2300015
- https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732121
- https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181131532/eating-disorder-helpline-takes-down-chatbot-after-it-gave-weight-loss-advice
- https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/serious-medical-error-from-perplexitys
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732039
AI can make medical professionals less competent
- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-025-11352-1