AI and Psychiatry – Go Retire Psychiatrist

I listened to the recent Rounding@Iowa podcast “The Promises of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.” Those who read my blog already know I’m cautious and probably prejudiced against it, especially if you’ve read any of my posts about AI.

I was a little surprised at how enthusiastic Dr. Gerry Clancy sounded about AI. I expected his guest, Dr. Jason Misurac, to sound that way. I waited for Gerry to mention the hallucinations that AI can sometimes produce. Neither he nor Dr. Misurac said anything about them.

Dr. Misurac mentioned what I think is the Ambient AI tools that clinicians can use to make clinic note writing and chart reviews easier. I think he was referring to the company called Ambience.

I remember using the Dragon Naturally Speaking (which was not using AI technology at the time; see my post “The Dragon Breathes Fire Again”) speech to text disaster I tried to use years ago to write clinical notes when I was practicing consultation-liaison psychiatry. It was a disaster and I realize I’m prejudiced against any technology that would make the kind of mistakes that technology was prone to.

But more importantly, I’m concerned about the kind of mistakes AI made when I experimented with Google Bard on my blog (see posts entitled “How’s It Hanging Bard?” and “Update to Chat with Bard” in April of 2023.

That reminds me that I’ve seen the icon for AI assistant lurking around my blog recently. I’ve tried to ignore it but I can’t unsee it. I was planning to let the AI assistant have a stab at editing this post so you and I can see what happens. However, I just read the AI Guidelines (which everyone should do), and it contains one warning which concerned me:

“We don’t claim any ownership over the content you generate with our AI features. Please note that you might not have complete ownership over the generated content either! For example, the content generated by AI may be similar to others’ content, including content that may be protected by trademark or copyright; and copyright ownership of generative AI outputs may vary around the world.”

That is yet another reason why I’m cautious about using AI.

I’ve got a couple of things to get off my chest about Artificial Intelligence (AI). By now, everyone knows about AI telling people to put hot glue on pizza and whatnot. Sena and I talked to a guy at an electronics store who had nothing but good things to say about AI. I mentioned the hot glue thing and pizza and it didn’t faze him.

I noticed the Psychiatric Times article, “AI in Psychiatry: Things Are Moving Fast.” They mention the tendency for AI to hallucinate and expressed appropriate reservations about its limitations.

And then I found something very interesting about AI and Cribbage. How much does AI know about the game? Turns out not much. Any questions? Don’t expect AI to answer them accurately.