THEY CAN ASK FREE- FORM QUESTIONS AND BE MUCH MORE NUANCED AND PROBING AND , DARE I SAY , MORE HUMAN IN INTERACTION . application in history with over 100 million users . Google , Microsoft , Baidu and Meta all launched competing products : Bard , Bing Chat , Ernie and LLaMA respectively . Large language model trained generative AI chatbots had become almost immediately commoditised . That is to say , the latest technology had become part of everyday life .
E D I T O R ' S Q U E S T I O N
DR ROBERT SACKIN
PARTNER AT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW FIRM REDDIE AND GROSE LLP
I
believe that the answer is ‘ power ’ and here ’ s why . Technology becomes commoditised when it becomes part of everyday life . In its more primitive form , commoditised technology for self-diagnosis can be traced all the way back to paper books , a papyrus scrolls or even cave paintings . Standalone computers became commoditised decades ago , and access to the Internet could perhaps be considered to have become commoditised by the start of this millennium .
These technologies enabled people to readily self-diagnose , but they are crude . Typically , one would look up a condition of interest or perhaps flick through a few conditions and select those that seem most relevant . One would then effectively run through a series of ' yes ' and ' no ' questions about relevant symptoms or perhaps there might be a more sophisticated scoring when diagnosis is perhaps very nuanced such as for neurological conditions .
I believe that these commoditised technologies were powerful and far from a failure .
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 and by January 2023 , it had become the fastest-growing consumer software
THEY CAN ASK FREE- FORM QUESTIONS AND BE MUCH MORE NUANCED AND PROBING AND , DARE I SAY , MORE HUMAN IN INTERACTION . application in history with over 100 million users . Google , Microsoft , Baidu and Meta all launched competing products : Bard , Bing Chat , Ernie and LLaMA respectively . Large language model trained generative AI chatbots had become almost immediately commoditised . That is to say , the latest technology had become part of everyday life .
And , of course , users are now able to use these systems for self-diagnosis for health-related purposes . They can ask free-form questions and be much more nuanced and probing and , dare I say , more human in interaction . However , concerns are being raised as the models used are not specifically trained for healthcare ; they are , by definition , general models trained on general data . This general data is wide ranging , and some may be of questionable scientific merit either intentionally or unintentionally .
In a recent study from May 2023 published in JMIR Human Factors , the findings were that ChatGPT had satisfactory explanatory power and positive risk-reward , and it was generally a positive experience for users . The study concluded that rather than discouraging the use of these tools that they should be improved by adapting them for healthcare applications . It seems to me that the next commoditised technology for self-diagnosis is large language model trained generative AI chatbots trained on sound healthcare data – power and not failure .
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