You could absolutely randomize care between a doctor and an AI under an IRB. I’d be stunned if there aren’t a dozen studies doing something like this already.
You have to justify it, but most places have sections in the document where you request review to justify it. It’s not any different from giving one patient heart medicine that you think works and another patient a sugar pill.
The issue is that those hypothetical scenarios do not have to look like how patients actually interact with the tool.
Real life use is full of ill posed questions open ended statements inaccurate assessment of symptoms, and conclusory remarks sprinkled in between. Real use of chat bots for Health by non-clinicians looks very different than scenario based evaluation.
I’ve never heard of in my entire life a doctor failing to recognize a medical emergency. /s
One of the things that people need to come to grips with is that like Wikipedia people will use ChatGPT because it is there. And the alternative is to be rich and have a primary care doctor that you can reach out to at a moments notice. Until that is different people will use these web services. It’s the same thing as Wikipedia or WebMD.
What do you expect that it’s gonna announce itself in a modal dialogue when you run the software?
This isn’t like AI image generation where you’re going to convince yourself that you can tell the difference based on how you think it looks. Do you really think no one in the production chain of any of the software that you use picked up copilot in the last two years?
What signal are you hoping to receive that this is happening?
You said that none of this was in production and then when people pointed out that it was obviously in production, you shifted the goal post to some other measure that you just imagined in your head.
The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.