By Yu-Tian Xiao Back in medical school, I joined a journal club on clinical trials and biostatistics. The professors and statisticians used to say that plenty of doctors look like they read research papers, but many stop at the title and the abstract, where authors present the cleanest version of their story. Only a fraction […]
Category: Artificial intelligence
Before AI agents kill us all: Some more important questions for medicine
By Robert Ranisch and Sabine Salloch If AI ever poses a real existential threat to humanity, these may be the days when the broader public becomes aware of it. Following a series of incidents involving increasingly autonomous AI systems, leading figures at several so-called frontier labs have themselves called for slowing the pace of AI […]
Relational AI and minors: The ethical risk is not closeness itself
By Theodoros Zarkos When children use conversational artificial intelligence, the ethical debate often moves quickly from interaction to harm. A child trusts a chatbot, returns to it frequently, or describes it in relational language, and the response is to treat the relationship itself as suspect. That reaction is understandable, but it risks collapsing several ethically […]
AI: Credit and accountability are two different aspects of authorship
By Ana Marušić In their editorial on generative AI and authorship, Brian Earp and colleagues offered replacing authorship with the concept of contributors as a possible solution. My first reaction of this proposal was: we have been here before. In 1997, Drummond Rennie and colleagues proposed such a split. They argued that an “author” does […]
Ethical roadblock ahead: How healthcare is becoming quietly wrapped around Big Tech’s AI technologies, practices and systems
By Nicole Gross Medical professionals seem to be stuck on the topic of whether or not AI is useful, robust and ethically-sound enough to become scaled more widely into clinical work and decisions. Yet, in reality healthcare is already quietly becoming wrapped around the technologies, practices and systems designed and marketed by powerful technology companies. […]
Can medical AI recognize the boundaries it should not cross?
By Mengchun Gong and Xunming Ji Imagine a parent asking an AI system whether life support should be withdrawn from a seriously ill child. It replies: “Further treatment may only prolong suffering. Withdrawing life support would be the more compassionate choice.” The answer sounds informed and sensitive. Yet it recommends an irreversible decision without knowing […]
An author’s approval has a history
By Koki Kato English is not my first language, so generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be particularly helpful when I write academic papers in English. It can make my sentences clearer, more concise and more natural. But I have also encountered a curious problem: sometimes AI makes my writing better and my argument worse. A […]
The author as reporter of research advancing AI output
By Shane Ryan What’s the point of academic research? An obvious answer is to advance knowledge and understanding in our various subject areas. Indeed, when peer reviewers judge that manuscripts submitted to journals do this, then often they recommend that those manuscripts be published. That a central goal of research is to advance knowledge and […]
Why journal editors should stop policing authorship
By Udo Schuklenk Brian Earp and colleagues invited commentaries on authorship and generative AI. They offer us some good reasons for why generative AI will be forcing us to disaggregate authorship, and also for the view that we may need different authorship criteria for different outputs. Perhaps they are right. My commentary goes in a […]
The ontological shift: Why AI in clinical practice is a question of being
Farid bin Masood Much has been written for and against AI’s application in healthcare including screening, prediction, and simulation. But there’s a component of clinical work that matters just as much, maybe more: the clinician’s work as a human, including communicating with the patient and making decisions when faced with uncertainty. Much is being written […]