ChatGPT generates cancer treatment plans that are full of errors — Study finds that ChatGPT provided false information when asked to design cancer treatment plans::Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that cancer treatment plans generated by OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot were full of errors.
I’m still confused that people don’t realize this. It’s not an oracle. It’s a program that generates sentences word by word based on statistical analysis, with no concept of fact checking. It’s even worse that someone actually did a study instead of simply acknowledging or realizing that ChatGPT is happy to just make stuff up.
Publish or perish, that’s why
I’m trying really hard for the latter.
Yeah this stuff was always marketed to automate simple and repetitive things we do daily. it’s mostly the media I guess who started misleading everyone into thinking this was AI like skynet. It’s still useful, not just as a all knowing AI god
I know university professors struggling with this concept. They are so convinced using an LLM is plagiarism.
It can lead to plagiarism if you use it poorly, which is why you control the information you feed it. Then proofread and edit.
I can understand the plagiarism argument, though you have to extend the definition of it. If I am expected to write an essay, but I use ChatGPT instead, then I am fraudulently presenting the work as my own. Plagiarism might not be the right word, or maybe it’s a case where language is going to evolve so that plagiarism includes passing off AI generated work as your own. Either way it’s cheating unless I was specifically allowed to use AI.
If the argument and the sources are incongruous, that isn’t the fault of the LLM/AI. That’s the authors fault for not proofreading and editing.
You assume an inherent morality of LLMs but they are amoral constructs. They are tools, and you limit yourself by not learning them.
I didn’t say anything about the sources being incongruent? That’s a completely separate issue. We were talking about plagiarism.
I don’t understand the morality comment either, I didn’t ascribe any morality to AI, I was talking about whether using them fits the definition of plagiarism or not.
If you are expected to write it yourself, and you use an LLM to generate it, then that’s cheating in my opinion. Yes, of course we shoukd learn to use AI, but if you are told to do something and you get a person or LLM to do it for you, then you didn’t complete the task as you were told. And at university that can have consequences.
This is why without some hitherto unknown or so far undeveloped capability of these sorts of LLM models, they’ll never actually be useful for performing any kind of mission critical work. The catch-22 is this: You can’t trust the AI to produce correct work without some kind of potentially dangerous, showstopping, or embarassing error. This isn’t a problem if you’re just, say, having it paint pictures. Or maybe even helping you twiddle the CSS on your web site. If there is a failure here, no one dies.
But what if your application is critical to life or safety? Like prescribing medical care, or designing a building that won’t fall down, or deciding which building the drone should bomb. Well, you have to get a trained or accredited professional in whatever field we’re talking about to check all of its work. And how much effort does that entail? As it turns out, pretty much exactly as much as having said trained or accredited professional do the work in the first place.
true, I tried to explain this to my parents because they were scared of it and they seemed skeptical.
But it’s supposed to be the future! I want the full talking spaceship like in Star Trek, not this … “initial learning steps” BS!
I was raised on SciFi and am now mad that I don’t have all the cool made up things from those shows/movies!
No duh - why would it have any ability to do that sort of task?
Part of the reason for studies like this is to debunk peoples’ expectations of AI’s capabilities. A lot of people are under the impression that cgatGPT can do ANYTHING and can think and reason when in reality it is a bullshitter that does nothing more than mimic what it thinks a suitable answer looks like. Just like a parrot.
Because if it’s able to crawl all of the science pubs, then it would be able to try different combos until it works. Isn’t that how it could/is being used, to test stuff?
It doesn’t check the stuff it generates other than on grammatical and orthographical errors. It’s not intelligent or has knowledge outside of how to create text. The text looks useful, but it doesn’t know what it contains in a way something intelligent would.
Recent papers have shown that LLMs build internal world models but about a topic as niche and complicated as cancer treatment, a chatbot based on GPT-3.5 be woefully ill-equipped to do any kind of proper reasoning.
It seems like it could check for that though, which is what chatgpt doesn’t do but we all assumed would. I’m sure there are ai programs that could and do check for possibilities on only information we know to be true.
People who understand the technology did not assume that, but yes the general public has a lot of misconceptions about it.
If you want an AI that can create cancer treatment, you need to train it on creating cancer treatment, and not just use one that is trained on general knowledge. Even if you train it on science publications, all it can now reliably do is mimic a science journal since it has not been trained on how to parse the knowledge in the journal itself.
Which is exactly the problem people think has been solved but isn’t anywhere near being solved. It cannot comprehend semantics, the meaning of things is completely beyond it and all other AIs.
Unfortunately saying I made a thing that creates vaguely human looking speech with little content isn’t astonishing to most people hence they are looking for something useful this breakthrough machine must be able to do and then they don’t find anything leading to these articles.
“Hey, program that is basically just regurgitating information, how do we do this incredibly complex things that even we don’t understand yet?”
“Here ya go.”
“Wow, this is wrong.”
“No shit.”
“Be aware that ChatGPT may produce wrong or inaccurate results, what is your question?”
How beat cancer
wrong, inaccurate information
😱
It reminds me of some particularly badly written episodes of Star Trek where they use the holodeck to simulate some weird scenario involving exotic physics nobody understands, and it works perfectly.
Why the fuck would anybody think a chat bot could create a cancer treatment plan?
Because it’s been hyped. They had announced it could pass the medical licensing exam with good scores. The belief that it can replace a doctor has already been put forward
It did pass it didn’t it. But who said it can replace doctors?
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
Better tech, same stupid end users lmao
Good old “garbage in, garbage out”.
Who tf is asking chatgpt for cancer treatments anyway?
It’s hilarious to me that people need to be told word for word that chat gpt is NOT literally the cure for cancer.
Real healthcare is expensive
Probably people who want to check AI accuracy or people who don’t want to search or go to the doctor and ask it to ChatGPT, even if I ask a cure, I will use other AI such as the bing AI, but still I go to the doctor, I will never ask an AI or search on the internet cures to cancer, never self-medicated.
Chatgpt is a language / chatbot. Not a doctor. Has anyone claimed that it’s a doctor?
Chatgpt fails at basic math, and lies ablut the existence of technical documentation.
I mostly use it for recipe inspuration and discussing books Ive read recently. Just banter, you know? Nothing mission-critical.
Just a couple days ago it continually told me it was possible to re-tile part of my shower that is broken without cutting tiles, but none of the math added up. (18.5H x 21.5w area) “Place a 9” tile vertically. Place another 9“ tile vertically on top on the same side. Place another 9" tile on top vertically to cover the remainder of the area."
I told chatgpt it was wrong, which it admitted, and spit out another wrong answer. I tried specifying a few more times before I started a new chat and dumbed it down to just a simple math algorithm problem. The first part of the chat said it was possible, layed out the steps, and then said it wasn’t possible in the last sentence.
I surely wouldn’t trust chatgpt to advise my healthcare, but after seeing it spit out very wrong answers to a basic math question, I’m just wondering why anyone would try to have it advise anyone’s health are.
Okay and? GPT lies how is this news every other day? Lazy ass journalists.
People really need to get in their heads that AI can “hallucinate” random information and that any implementation on an AI needs a qualified human overseeing it.
Exactly, it’s stringing together information in a series of iterations, each time adding a new inference consistent with what came before. It has no way to know if that inference is correct.
These studies are for the people out there who think ChatGPT thinks. Its a really good email assistant, and it can even get basic programming questions right if you are detailed with your prompt. Now everyone stop trying to make this thing like Finn’s mom in adventure time and just use it to helo you write a long email in a few seconds. Jfc.
I use ChatGPT primarily for programming, and it’s particularly well suited for programming.
“Even get basic programming questions right if you are detailed with your prompt”
is underselling its capabilities in that regard. Especially GPT-4 has been able to help me with everything from obscure adobe ExtendScript scripts to infrequently seen ‘unsafe’ C# OpenGL perspective matrix math. All with prompts of a sentence maximum.
I’m specifically referring to ChatGPT. GPT-4 is a different beast that I’m sure is quite adept.
ChatGPT is GPT 3.5 & GPT 4, as far as I’m aware.
3.5 is also very capable when it comes to programming, for any well known framework or language. It’s not as capable, but it is still very capable.
I found it was okay with Unity libraries but really good with things like Excel.Interop and business libraries, as well as general programming concepts like linked lists.
Well, the data it was trained on had a cutoff point in 2021 which would explain that.
I’ve used it (GPT 3) a fair amount for Unity, and I’m fairly pleased with the results, it’s saved me a fair amount of time. Implementing object pooling and editor window dialogues for scene translation management for example.
Of course, programming knowledge is required for it to be of consistent use, which, on second thought, may not be at all obvious.
Maybe Visual Scripting is on the cusp of its knowledge. I thought it released in 2021. It has replaced my rubber ducky in corporate environments thats for sure. I plan on using it again for game development after this discussion. My visual scripting use case was off the beaten path which was probably why it had a hard time.
I use it for D&D. It’s fantastic at coming up with adventures, NPCs, story hooks, taverns, etc.
All of those things are made up.
Its fantastic at that. I had it help me with a Dark Heresy session. Its not bad at generating names, places, and even personalities for jobbers.
I’m going to need it to turn those emails back into the bullet points used to create them, so I don’t have to read the filler.
It can leave the bullets if you tell it.
Look, I am all for seeing pros and cons. A.I. has a massive benefit to humanity and it has its issues but this article is just silly.
Why in the fuck are you using ChatGPT to set a cancer plan? When did ChatGPT claim to be a medical doctor.
Just go see a damn doctor.
I have been getting surveys asking my opinion on ai as a healthcare practitioner (pharmacist). I feel like they are testing the waters.
AI is really dangerous for healthcare right now. I’m sure people are using it to ask regular questions they normally Google. I’m sure administrators are trying to see how they can use it to “take the pressure off” their employees (then fire some employees to “tighten the belt”).
If they can figure out how to fact check the AI results, maybe my opinion can change, but as long as AI can convincingly lie and not even know it’s lying, it’s a super dangerous tool.
For me the issue isn’t the tool. It’s people. The tool is used just as it is. A tool.
I always like to compare these things to other physical tools. If you take a philips screw driver to a flathead screw you don’t blame the tool you blame yourself for bringing the improper tool because as a human you can make mistakes. As a human you should have figured out prior, “do I need a flathead or philips?” There are tools capable of doing the job and doing it properly.
Same if you are an operator on a piece of machinery. If you take a forklift to destroy a house you probably aren’t going to get very far.
All of these tools were designed to make life easier and provide a positive to life when doing something but it is how you use the tool that matters.
The same with a gun. I am not a gun ownership kind of guy because of all the shit human beings that just can’t use one properly or claim to use it properly. Guns get more complicated and so do their use cases but the truth is a gun was designed to kill or defend from being killed (this is not a topic about gun rights just using it as an example.) However, in the hands of the wrong person a gun can kill unintentionally. That isn’t the guns fault after all its design was to kill.
ChatGPT wasn’t designed to kill, inherently. It wasn’t designed to do anything other than take databases of information and provide what it thinks is correct. If you as a person don’t know how to use it or what to do with it probably and you aren’t seeking actual medical attention or advice from a professional then I think that is the person’s fault.
ChatGPT can’t make a disclaimer for every little thing. A car on the other hand having a recall issue can. If you want to compare to a faulty part in a car then sure. Modify ChatGPT to just not provide medical advice.
See tools can be changed midway through. The tool isn’t the problem how the person uses the tool is the issue. Access to that tool and what that tool has access to can be an issue but the great thing about tools is laws can change and tools can change.
It isn’t the A.I.s fault if your legislature doesn’t care to enforce that change or law. The same legislature that half of Lemmy is opposed to literally all the time. Tools are only good in ways they can be used as well.
So let’s say for arguments sake the tool is dangerous and in your defense it absolutely can be used dangerously. Do you call upon the government to shut it down just like you would call upon the government to regulate or change gun laws?
Do you also ignore the positive impacts ChatGPT can have because it is doing something else terribly? Imagine a system that medical professionals do create and they modify a version that does provide good medical advice, accurate, and professional? What then? Is ChatGPT still bad? It’s not out of the realm of possibility. A.I isn’t the enemy because someone’s leadership decided to fire you. Leadership is the enemy. Tools are only as bad as the people using them.
Or for the sake of a recalled care that can kill they are as bad as the user manufacturing them. I don’t deny you can get a bad car, a bad screwdriver. My point is if you let the bad outweigh the good then you are missing the point. The bad should be handled by people who understand it better and can design laws and tools to enforce better usage to make something less bad. So again don’t blame the tool blame the people that aren’t protecting you with said tool.
The issue is hospital administrators thinking that AI is the answer to boost profits
The computer science classroom in my high school had a poster stating: “Garbage in garbage out”
People really need to understand what LLMs are, and also what they are not. None of the messianic hype or even use of the term “AI” helps with this, and most of the ridiculous claims made in the space make me expect Peter Molyneux to be involved somehow.
LLMs fit in the “weak AI” category. I’d be inclined to not call them “AI” at all, since there is no intelligence, just the illusion of intelligence (if I could just redefine the term “AI”). It’s possible to build intelligent AI, but probabilistic text construction isn’t even close.
It’s possible to build intelligent AI
What does intelligent AI that we can currently build look like?
There’s “can build” and “have built”. The basic idea is about continuously aggregating data and performing pattern analysis and basically cognitive schema assimilation/accommodation in the same way humans do. It’s absolutely doable, at least I think so.
Why is anyone surprised by this? It’s not meant to be your doctor.
What’s with all the hit jobs on ChatGPT?
Prompts were input to the GPT-3.5-turbo-0301 model via the ChatGPT (OpenAI) interface.
This is the second paper I’ve seen recently to complain ChatGPT is crap and be using GPT3.5. There is a world of difference between 3.5 and 4. Unfortunately news sites aren’t savvy enough to pick up on that and just run with “ChatGPT sucks!” Also it’s not even ChatGPT if they’re using that model. The paper is wrong (or it’s old) because there’s no way to use that model in the ChatGPT interface. I don’t think there ever was either. It was probably ChatGPT 0301 or something which is (afaik) slightly different.
Anyway, tldr, paper is similar to “I tried running Diablo 4 on my Windows 95 computer and it didn’t work. Surprised Pikachu!”
And this tech community is being weirdly luddite over it as well, saying stuff like “it’s only a bunch of statistics predicting what’s best to say next”. Guess what, so are you, sunshine.
I mean, people are slightly more complicated than that. But sure, at their most basic, people simply communicate with statistical models.
Ok, maybe slightly :) but it surprises me that the ability to emulate a basic human is dismissed as “just statistics”, since until a year ago it seemed like an impossible task…
The dismissal is coming from the class of people most threatened by these systems.
Might be true for you but most people do have a concept of true and false and don’t just dream up stuff to say.
Do they? *Laughs nervously in American.
Actually we ‘dream up’ things to say quite a lot. As in our unconscious functions are far more important to our mental processes than we like to admit. Also we are basically not very good at evaluating the truth value of complex expressions.
IMO for AI to reach a useful point it needs to be able to learn. Now I’m no expert on neural networks, but if it can’t learn anything new once it’s been trained, it’s never really going to reach its true potential. It can imitate a human, but that’s about it. Once AI can really learn, it’ll become an order of magnitude more useful. Don’t get me wrong: all this AI work is a step in the right direction, but we’ll only be able to go so far with pre-trained models.
Absolutely agree that this is a necessary next step!
Hah! That’s the response I always give! I’m not saying our brains work the exact same way because they don’t and there’s still a lot missing from current AI but I’ve definitely noticed that at least for myself, I do just predict the next word when I’m talking or writing (with some extra constraints). But even with LLMs there’s more going on then that since the attention mechanism allows it to consider parts of the prompt and what it’s already written as it’s trying to come up with the next word. On the other hand, I can go back and correct mistakes I make while writing and LLMs can’t do that…it’s just a linear stream.
Agree, I have definitely fallen for the temptation to say what sounds better, rather than what’s exactly true… Less so in writing, possibly because it’s less of a linear stream.
This is just stupid clickbait. Would you use a screwdriver as a hammer? No. Of course not. Anyone with even a little bit of sense understands that GPT is useful for some things and not others. Expecting it to write a cancer treatment plan, it’s just outlandish.
Even GPT says:I’m not a substitute for professional medical advice. Creating a cancer treatment plan requires specialized medical knowledge and the input of qualified healthcare professionals. It’s important to consult with oncologists and medical experts to develop an appropriate and effective treatment strategy for cancer patients. If you have questions about cancer treatment, I recommend reaching out to a medical professional.
