Artificial intelligence tools have been proven to help doctors detect precancerous growths in the colon, but don’t even think about giving up on these tools if you’ve already started using them. A new study published this week in The Lancet showed that doctors who are provided with artificial intelligence tools to identify potential cancer risks in patients perform worse when they return to work without the help of artificial intelligence.
The study analyzed four endoscopy centers in Poland, tracking the success rate of colon cancer detection during the three months prior to the introduction of AI tools and the three months following their introduction. After the introduction of AI, colonoscopies were randomly divided into those that received AI support and those that did not. The researchers found that doctors who performed colonoscopies without AI after gaining access to its assistance saw a decline in detection rates, with results 20% worse than before the introduction of AI.
The results of the study are even more alarming given that the 19 doctors who participated in the study were highly experienced, each having performed more than 2,000 colonoscopies. If even these doctors can fall victim to deskilling, watching their own skills deteriorate due to their dependence on artificial intelligence tools, then the results of inexperienced doctors’ work may be even worse.
There is no doubt that artificial intelligence tools can be useful in medicine. There are numerous studies showing that artificial intelligence can facilitate everything from cancer detection to disease diagnosis based on a patient’s medical history. Analyzing information based on a huge number of previous examples is the main function of artificial intelligence (as opposed to generating meaningless content), and there is evidence that people can expand their capabilities with the help of artificial intelligence tools. Research in the medical field has shown that doctors who use these tools can achieve better outcomes for their patients.
But no one, including doctors, is immune to the risk of switching off their brain and relying on artificial intelligence rather than their own skills. Earlier this year, Microsoft published a study that found that employees who rely on artificial intelligence stop thinking critically about their work and are confident that artificial intelligence will be sufficient to complete the task. Researchers at MIT also found that relying on ChatGPT to write essays led to a less critical attitude toward the material. In the long term, there is a real risk that relying on AI will undermine our ability to solve problems and reason, which is not ideal when AI continues to generate unreliable information.
The American Medical Association has found that approximately two out of three doctors already use artificial intelligence to enhance their capabilities. We hope that they are still able to recognize when artificial intelligence is doing something like hallucinating about a body part that does not exist.
