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Obviously, I agree replacing doctors is a terrible idea.

That said, in the last 5 years I have broken an ankle in a rock climbing accident, and gotten a herniated disk in my neck from wrestling. Both times, medical professionals misdiagnosed me for months (both times until I eventually found a doctor who would refer me for an MRI which proved the issue in both cases). This resulted in a lot of undue suffering and increased damage.

In both cases, I explained the situation and symptoms to GPT3 (this is before ChatGPT was released), and it correctly diagnosed the issue in both circumstances, down to the exact bone I most likely fractured in my ankle (talus), and down to the exact vertebrae I was likely herniated in my neck (C6-C7).

Now, I "consult" GPT before going to the doctor.

I think this may end up being the most powerful application of GPT. While I've been using it for coding, most of it is high level "what are the trade-offs?" kind of thinking and very little actual code.

A person with some background and sufficient general knowledge, but who is a non-expert on a topic, can dive into a topic and allow the AI to handle most of the detail work. What do I need to know to understand this? It falls out naturally from the exploration of the topic, in a faster and more integrated way compared to chasing down articles and definitions.

It's like having a research assistant, that is an expert that has read everything ever published about the topic, and that is also infinitely patient. Of course, it's also prone to bouts of being confidently incorrect, and it can't actually reason, or think up anything new. That may seem like a serious limitation, but it also describes many of my college professors, and they still taught me plenty. ;)

I think ChatGPT is most similar to text-davinci-003 which does have gaps in it's knowledge which it can be stubborn about but code-davinci-002 has fewer gaps and can be more reasonable about requests. It's sometimes gets stuck in a loop though and is in beta with very limited capacity. Point being ChatGPT is the not quite best programming model.

I watched a show in the 80s about expert systems essentially playing 20 questions with a patient (via a human typing assistant) and the computer was already more accurate than doctors in a study. The fucking 80s.

Doctors have a very powerful Union. They don’t call it a union, but it’s a union.

Perhaps it's not going to be about replacing doctors, it's about remembering everything they know in aggregate and distributing it wholesale to augment their work along with healthcare provision in general, while increasing access inclusiveness by empowering patients. Has the potential to be most transformative in parts of the world and socioeconomic stratums/zones where internet connected smartphones are widespread, but timely, inclusive and affordable healthcare is not.

I'm an ex editorial illustrator and midjourney can do the whole job often enough. With about 20% of ideas I try out I've been able to get submission ready work. Maybe another 30% can be cleaned up without too much hassle in Photoshop. I don't expect these odds to get worse in the future.

A photographer friend of mine had a gig to do some festive food arrangements. He needed a full day and a half, a studio, $30k in gear and years of professional experience. All I needed was 5 minutes and some clever prompt poetry. I did not have the heart to show him why he might have a hard time getting a similar gig next year.

As Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption proposes: the disruptive product does not need to be better. It needs to be good enough and far cheaper. So cheap now that there is zero marginal cost for bespoke art.

That's what people have been telling themselves for over a decade, I think. At least articles on news sites about who should be wary of AI and how much had been quite fashionable back then. And then people would respond with "yeah, it will probably automate away those other jobs and it will be able to do the simple and boring part of my work that unskilled/low-end people in my field do, but experienced/knowledgable dudes like me will always be in demand. It's just that our work will be more interesting." And you would hear lawyers and graphic designers and accountants respond with this same theme. (For some reason, software developers were always thought to be untouchable anyway.)

And then AI came a long way, improved to levels hard to imagine back then, it's already threatening programmers, but people just keep telling the same story. That somehow it will run out of steam below their level. If it can talk to a professional it can just as much talk to whoever talks to the professional now. (I mean, unless it gets stuck at a lower level.)

However, when people talk about the future dangers, they still keep looking at the current status quo and not at how fast it evolves. Of course, it's hard to predict, but it seems like some people don't even try and just judge based on what we have today. While what we have been seeing so far is that it's evolving faster than what most experts have expected.

Replacing doctors is probably further away, because being a doctor is like being an airline pilot: it's about trust big time. And everybody likes to think their doctor (or pilot) is especially good. Oh, and also doctors do have to interact with the real world, like examine the patient. (Programmers don't ;) )

I agree 100% with you. I have a free digital monthly magazine in PDF. It has articles, etc. Finding images was a hard task: I had to find good images, creative commons, etc.

For the last month I paid MidJourney and it was amazing. I enjoy doing the magazine much more now. As you said, the image doesnt need to be exact, they must have some objects / surface a topic or idea. And I can modify them with Photoshop if I want to change something (or add text).

I think that's where the IA will prevail: scenarios where the requirements are not really important.

Remember three years ago when AI couldn't do any of the stuff you described? I'm confident the capabilities will continue to improve.

To be fair though, that's the poem it produced when the entire prompt were the words "ode to a space lizard".

It's like with describing a commission: If you just give basic info, then there is a lot left for the artist to guess, and they might be inclined to err on the safe side.

I often got better results when I included more info in the prompt.

E.g., here that could be: What is a space lizard? What's so amazing about it? What should the general emotion of the poem be? Should it be of some particular style? etc etc.

True, I was intentionally trying to make it do something weird to see how it'd fail. But it's not just a lack of information. A tail might help with swimming but won't propel you through the void. And "anything deployed" is awkward. And what's an "intergalactic norm"? And so on.

I think more information would result in something more interesting, but I don't think it'd fix the problem that some of the concepts used just don't add up, because it's not actually a thinking machine, just very fancy statistics that work surprisingly well.

>A tail might help with swimming but won't propel you through the void.

No offense, but I feel like if you're criticizing ai-written poetry for a lack of absolute realism, maybe you're the one that doesn't quite grok poetry. Next you'll be telling Poe that ravens can't actually enunciate human speech.

So the skill lies in knowing how to make a good prompt.

Sounds like human work.

It's 3 am in the morning, there's a medical condition that came up suddenly, I'm on hold forever - you can be sure I will jump on an AI first. I'll get clear answers first that probably compete with or exceed over the phone diagnosis accuracy and the virtual diagnostician wont disappear after I hang up.

That will cut costs, so it will be used no matter the outcome. Humans make mistakes too, right? US is ripe for multi-tier medicine. Limiting diagnostics to AI will be preferable to huge medical bills for so many.