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‘Embarrassingly simple’ probe finds AI in medical image diagnosis ‘worse than random’
(venturebeat.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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AI
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.
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This is pretty dumb, machine learning algorithms (fuck off with calling it AI) are especially good at seeing signs of disease in data such as xrays, CT and MRI scans. It's the one place they really help save time and prevent mistakes. And even if it's just to flag shit for a second opinion by a doctor and not to replace the doctor, that's still super useful. Pattern recognition is hard and these kinds of algorithms are very good at them if provided the right source data to work off.
If only the media and big corps would stop claiming LLMs are general AI, then maybe people would stop using them for stuff it's clearly not good at and not meant for.
This isn't dumb. This is a very good study as it is helping to remind people that these fancy new tools aren't good at everything. The media reporting on this is doing a service.
Edit: my bad making two responses
By casting doubt on a related but fundamentally different bit of medical tech? Yeah that's what we need: more folks questioning medicine based on pop science understandings of the technology.
Good point
Can't stop people calling it AI. People have called video game bots AI since the 90s, even in industry. Any algorithm is a form of artificial intelligence, really. LLMs and machine vision are multipurpose, though I agree that general-purpose is still a stretch.
Seriously, the field of artificial intelligence has been around since the beginning of computer science, since Alan Turing founded it after coming up with the modern computer. Frankly, if you ask me, anyone complaining about LLMs being referred to as AI has been watching too many movies. AI != Human-but-metal and it never has. Going by the Wikipedia article, to be considered AI, a machine just has to perceive it's environment and learn - degree notwithstanding.
Of course this definition is pretty vague, so in practice AI tends to refer to the cutting edge of flexible computer algorithms. Many now-mundane algorithms much simpler than today's LLMs (like A* and genetic algorithms) were once considered AI for their flexible logic. At some point the Internet decided that it doesn't count unless it's literally Jarvis, but that's a very stingy definition of a very broad field.
Why wouldn't agents in video games be AI, though? Things like are pathfinding, search, and behaviour trees are commonly used for agents in games, and in computer science these are widely considered to be artificial intelligence techniques. It's unlikely that you would find a CS textbook calling the Fast Fourier Transform AI though, or things like Bresenham's Line Drawing algorithm.
Absolutely. I wouldn't call Bresenham AI. In some contexts, like games, I might call A* search AI. But to someone from the Victorian era who paid people to compute taylor series by hand, something basic and flexible like a microprocessor which can run bresenham or FFT or etc. etc. ... might have been seen as artificial intelligence. Using a machine to solve a problem that normally requires human brainpower.