Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
For as long as ChatGPT has existed, Americans have been asking it, “Could that funny little spot on my toe be cancer?” And as AI has advanced over the past few years, doctors have begun to use specialized models to ask much the same questions in clinics. In the face of these developments, professional medical societies have presented a unified front: Doctors must always have the final say in clinical care. We disagree. As the medical societies allow, physicians’ enhancing their work with AI tools may be a perfectly good way to deliver medicine. But for Americans to get the best health care possible, we need to be willing to experiment with models that put AI in control…….Continue reading…
By: Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Vinod Kholsa
Source: The Atlantic
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Critics:
Medical training needs to change immediately so human doctors can focus on what they uniquely provide—like ethical reasoning, physical touch, and complex human empathy—rather than acting as slower, less efficient “instruments in a white coat”. A major point of friction highlighted in the JAMA and Atlantic papers is the warning that poorly integrated human-AI hybrids can actually degrade performance.
When doctors blindly trust or incorrectly override automated systems, errors increase. Medicine needs rigorous protocols to determine exactly when autonomous models should work independently. Data from the American Medical Association (AMA) shows that over 80% of physicians now use some form of AI in their daily practice, a massive jump from just 38% a few years prior.
Hospital networks are heavily implementing ambient AI scribes from companies like Nuance, Abridge, and Nabla to tackle documentation burdens and clinician burnout. Institutions like Johns Hopkins Medicine are already deploying fully autonomous FDA-cleared AI to screen adult and pediatric patients for diabetic eye disease, successfully expanding access and equity.The overarching takeaway from the current debate is clear:
AI cannot replace the ultimate accountability of a human clinician, but the medical field can no longer afford to treat AI as a futuristic luxury.
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