cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34581821

paywall bypass: https://archive.is/whVMI

the study the article is about: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

article text:

AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study

By Harry Black

August 12, 2025 at 10:30 PM UTC

Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study.

AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed, their ability to find tumors dropped by about 20% compared with rates before the tool was ever introduced, according to findings published Wednesday.

Health-care systems around the world are embracing AI with a view to boosting patient outcomes and productivity. Just this year, the UK government announced £11 million ($14.8 million) in funding for a new trial to test how AI can help catch breast cancer earlier.

The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, “leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,” the scientists said in the paper.

They surveyed four endoscopy centers in Poland and compared detection success rates three months before AI implementation and three months after. Some colonoscopies were performed with AI and some without, at random. The results were published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology journal.

Yuichi Mori, a researcher at the University of Oslo and one of the scientists involved, predicted that the effects of de-skilling will “probably be higher” as AI becomes more powerful.

What’s more, the 19 doctors in the study were highly experienced, having performed more than 2,000 colonoscopies each. The effect on trainees or novices might be starker, said Omer Ahmad, a consultant gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London.

“Although AI continues to offer great promise to enhance clinical outcomes, we must also safeguard against the quiet erosion of fundamental skills required for high-quality endoscopy,” Ahmad, who wasn’t involved in the research, wrote a comment alongside the article.

A study conducted by MIT this year raised similar concerns after finding that using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write essays led to less brain engagement and cognitive activity.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    17 hours ago

    We assessed how endoscopists who regularly used AI performed colonoscopy when AI was not in use.

    I wonder if mathematicians who never used a calculator are better at math than mathematicians who typically use a calculator but had it taken away for a study.

    Or if grandmas who never got smartphones are better at remembering phone numbers than people with contacts saved in their phone.

    Tip: your brain optimizes. So it reallocates resources away from things you can outsource. We already did this song and dance a decade ago with “is Google making people dumb” when it turned out people remembered how to search for a thing instead of the whole thing itself.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 hours ago

      Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.

      Every time ‘new tool makes old skills rusty’ is treated as novel, I’m reminded of The Gentleman’s Magazine:

      Instead of simply reproducing the operations of man’s intelligence, the arithmometer relieves that intelligence from the necessity of making the operations. Instead of repeating responses dictated to it, this instrument instantaneously dictates the proper answer to the man who asks it a question. It is not matter producing material effects, but matter which thinks, reflects, reasons, calculates, and executes all the most difficult and complicated arithmetical operations with a rapidity and infallibility which defies all the calculators in the world. The arithmometer is, moreover, a simple instrument, of very little volume and easily portable. It is already used in many great financial establishments, where considerable economy is realized by its employment.

      It will soon be considered as indispensable, and be as generally used as a clock, which was formerly only to be seen in palaces, and is now in every cottage.

      This was a crank-powered adding machine. Numbers used levers instead of buttons because buttons hadn’t been invented yet. There were already people who expected it the next version would do everything for us - and people who thought that would be bad, somehow.

      • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        5 hours ago

        Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.

        Seriously at what point did search engines stop matching results by keyword?! Just a few days ago I tried looking for a quote I didn’t fully remember, but knew the basic thesis and some identifying terms it definitely mentioned and all I got was tabloid articles for pages and pages on end which only vaguely matched the thesis but didn’t mention any of the identifying terms I remember the quote using. It threw me for a loop because I remember being taught in school to search for stuff this way and I don’t know if I’m just stupid or misremembered the quote or search engines don’t actually match keywords anymore. Why would they remove the most basic form of search, literally just regexing for all the strings given?!

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          5 hours ago

          This year they stopped fucking trying. You search three words and it ignores two of them. “We didn’t find many results for that.” Yeah! That’s why I wrote it that way! I didn’t type “colossus of argyle” because I wanted a thousand generic pages about a statue. Gimme some damn prog.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    22 hours ago

    AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed,

    AI improved doctors’ ability to spot cancer.

    The problem was not exercising a skill for several months, and then taking away the tool which was better than that skill.

  • frongt@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    23 hours ago

    If, while using the tool, the rates remained higher over time, I think it’s still a net positive.

    • Majestic@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      21 hours ago

      Okay you say this but these tools are privately owned. What happens when one day the provider slams them with a 1000% price increase? They can either pay or go back to doctors who detect cancer even worse. It gives these AI companies undue influence and turns a tool into a crutch and an addiction which can be leveraged to drive up healthcare costs and punish providers who don’t play ball perhaps resulting in deaths from doctors in systems that don’t have access to the tool because they’re in a payment dispute with it or they had it but stopped paying for it and patients may not know any of this.

      This is a nightmare for human beings who have fought hard to grow smart, to be intelligent as a species and to have educated professionals who have learned to use their brains be instead trained by these machines to stop using their brains, to atrophy them, to become dependent on these systems and worse than before the moment they are removed.

      It will be used to attack the wages of doctors and I guarantee that they won’t be compensated with cheaper schooling (doctors need at least 6 years of university plus additional years in training before being able to practice on their own, it’s an immense expense and burden in a time of rising costs and huge debt). Which will lead to shortages of doctors and they’ll be replaced with AI and nurses not up to the task and we’ll be told this is fine. Having access to a thinking human being may become a gated luxury that few insurance companies want to shell out for until after you’ve been evaluated by AI systems several times and only IF those systems deem it necessary. Some AI systems will make mistakes that kill patients and insurance companies will be fine with this as a quickly dead patient is usually cheaper than paying for months or years of treatments and/or surgeries so they’ll have a perverse incentive to push patients towards those systems. Doctors take an oath not to do harm, not all take that as seriously as they should but usually there’s some compassion there whereas a computer system would not care one bit if you’re denied and unlike a doctor won’t fight for you against the insurance companies.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Paragraph one says things getting better is bad because what if we stop.

        Paragraph two is bemoaning the abacus for ruining mental math.

        Paragraph three blames a new gizmo for the system as it exists.

      • Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        18 hours ago

        It’s important to remember that this is not generative AI. It doesn’t say who owns it though.

        A competitor could easily be developed with access to the same data.

        For the record, I didn’t read all that because it’s too long.