Like many of you, I could do without another story about Artificial Intelligence and how it will revolutionize your health or life beyond your wildest dreams. We are constantly hearing more implementations of AI technology to make our lives easier, yet I for one am skeptical. For years, I have doubted that such technology can replace doctors, though I’ve agreed that the vast amounts of clinical data in medical practice does necessitate some technological aid to get the best out of it. This study suggests that AI can outdo humans in an area we would think very unlikely, empathy, yet I disagree.
Technically, the computers do not feel empathy for their “patient”, but this study looked at the AI generated responses towards what they considered real-world health questions. They compared these responses to what physicians offered to the same questions. A panel of licensed healthcare professionals then rated those responses without knowing their sources. Surprisingly, the responses generated by the ChatGPT AI process were preferred 79% of the time. They also rated the ChatGPT responses as more empathetic.
While they lauded this finding as hopeful opportunities for improving healthcare, I considered this rather pathetic. I cannot share their excitement that real humans, practicing real medicine for real people, cannot offer more empathetic responses to suffering patients sitting before them. I would also challenge the researchers to consider that they are staging the competition in a digital forum like a health care portal where no body language or tone of voice is available to augment the human response. In this situation, the words on the screen are nothing more than words on the screen. The human is at a disadvantage in not being able to utilize their full range of empathetic responses.
Even if we give away that high ground and participate in the digital communication world, one would hope that a human would care enough to offer more empathy than a computer. Rather than a triumph of computer AI, I see this as a failure of the state of the medical system culture. Apparently, we are either bringing in less empathetic medical students to become future doctors, or the medical education system is training them poorly in terms of actually caring for those they care for. Then there is the third layer in that we have a medical system with an accelerator pedal jammed at high speed, forcing doctors to spend less and less time with patients and more time with the computers that demand their charting and attention. Of course, humans are going to become less empathetic in such an environment in order to avoid drowning in the time demands.
Rather than looking to AI and technology to learn how to sound empathetic while still not really caring for the real person in front of us, we should pause and learn how to care for real. If we care and learn to communicate that actual compassion in person, then our patients are going to feel more empathy in our words whether spoken or typed. Restoring patients to healthier more abundant lives may need computer technology to process vast genetic and metabolic data available, but it first needs real people really caring for real people with real empathy rather than the simulacrum of emotion we get from the AI’s computer algorithms.
Primary Article:
John W. Ayers, Adam Poliak, Mark Dredze, Eric C. Leas, Zechariah Zhu, Jessica B. Kelley, Dennis J. Faix, Aaron M. Goodman, Christopher A. Longhurst, Michael Hogarth, Davey M. Smith. Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2023; DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1838
Thanks to Science Daily:
University of California – San Diego. “Study finds ChatGTP outperforms physicians in providing high-quality, empathetic advice to patient questions.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 April 2023. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230428130734.htm>.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
