Tag: AI Prognosis

Brittany Trang, Ph.D., covers AI in health and medicine: Does it actually work? Who benefits, or might be harmed? She writes the weekly AI Prognosis newsletter. Follow her on Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. You can reach Brittany on Signal at btrang.01.

This is the web edition of STAT’s AI Prognosis newsletter, our guide to artificial intelligence in health care and medicine. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Wednesday. 

Today is the first day of the STAT Summit in Boston! If you’re not attending in person (tickets for tomorrow are still available!), you can tune in virtually. Subscribers get a 40% discount on both virtual and in-person tickets.

I’m looking forward to “When the Promise of AI Doesn’t Pan Out,” which is scheduled for just after noon ET today, and STAT executive editor Rick Berke’s interview with Katelyn Jetelina, better known as “Your Local Epidemiologist,” whom I’m still starstruck by. 

You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s AI Prognosis newsletter

This is the web edition of STAT’s AI Prognosis newsletter, our guide to artificial intelligence in health care and medicine. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Wednesday. 

*Bernie Sanders voice* I am once again asking you to … forward this email to a friend! Non-subscribers can now sign up to get (a truncated version of) AI Prognosis. Tell ya buddies and coworkers!

Also, tell your buddies about this essay from our new trust-in-science reporter, Nick Florko. Faced with health problems, he’s tried diets, supplements, and peptides — he understands the allure of non-scientifically backed treatments, and wants to listen to skeptics as he writes about doubt, misinformation, and distrust.

Making sense of AI doomerism

Over the last couple weeks, the fervor about whether AI will kill us all and needs to be slowed has continued on at a rolling boil.

At STAT, we’ve discussed whether we need to write about it. But I have qualms: Firstly, the kind of nefarious AI that could potentially lead to human extinction is so far removed from still-error-prone health care AI that it’s almost impossible to talk about both at the same time.

Then: Is this all marketing, as Anthropic and OpenAI prepare to go public? Are all of the recently disclosed AI safety incidents actually just examples of AI companies’ basic incompetence at cybersecurity and infrastructure skills, packaged to make the AI look impossibly smart?

And then there’s the matter of finding someone who knows enough about AI to talk about it knowledgeably, but who also doesn’t have any incentive to frame it one way or another. (More on that in the next section.)

In today’s issue, I’ll refer you to a few good reads in a few different areas (general AI, health care, and biology) to help make sense of this.