Hacker News Reader

Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if chatgpt existed back then you'd have had your carcinoma extracted along with 10 other benign anomalies.

Automation doesn't make up for carelessness.

Skin cancer is easily treated with excisions if it’s caught early. Better to have ten small false positives than a single miss.

Even if addressing each false positive would carrying low but real risk of death or complications?

Is your "low but real" risk comparable to the risk of driving a motorcycle, of riding in a car, or of using the bathroom?

Reasonable treatments for small, non-aggressive skin cancers (or suspected cancers) are extremely low risk. And reasonable practitioners will often suggest that you merely keep an eye on an abnormal spot - because it doesn't look worth the bother of any sort of treatment for now.

That's not how risk management works, you don't disregard one because another is higher, because risk compose. At the end of the day you'll be in a car accident coming from a surgery you didn't need.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. In its specific case that's quite obviously not a good example because removing benign spots isn't harmful, but overlooking malignant ones is, so there is no downside.

But if we think a little further and generalize then there is great risk (and by extension, harm) to delegate diagnosis and treatment (of health issues in general, including potentially or supposedly fatal ones) to ChatGPT and similar tech. That we'd end up with a net positive is far from obvious.

I still maintain my point that it isn't harmless to blindly address benign anomalies. Every medical procedure carries risk.

Your point doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Even with ChatGPT existing and making 90% bad calls, a doctor isn’t likely to just “blindly” be cutting out anomalies.

As opposed to what OP said?

Your original comment seemed to imply that if ChatGPT had existed, maybe they’d have had ten benign things removed. But that’s not how it works.

Conversely, ChatGPT can help avoid false negatives.

  It was a carcinoma, and surgery removed it. If ChatGPT had existed back then, this carcinoma would have been removed several years earlier.

My point is against this technical positivism.

Obviously, error rate of ChatGPT should be measured by comparing to human diagnoses and when it plateaus, we should investigate a possibility that the number is driven mostly by human errors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com