Medical practice is about the human interaction between clinicians and patients, but what does it mean when a technology with human-like attributes such as AI enters the examination room? How does the dynamic between clinicians and patients change when AI is involved? [JAMA]

In a recent interview, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS, editor in chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network, discussed this aspect of AI with primary care physician Ida Sim, PhD, MD (Video). Sim is codirector of a joint program between the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in computational precision health. She is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American College of Medical Informatics.

The following is an edited version of the interview.

Dr Bibbins-Domingo: I think of you as a physician who’s been in this informatics research space for a long time. You’ve also thought about how we create structures for sharing data and making data more accessible, and now all of us are talking about AI, and it’s transforming how we’re going to practice. It’s transforming how we’re going to do science. Why are we talking with a different urgency right now?

Dr Sim:I t is an urgency, absolutely. I think November 30, 2022, is going to go down in history. That was the day when ChatGPT came out. I had been talking to other people here in Silicon Valley about ChatGPT-2.0, about DALL-E, and it was just mind-blowing what was going on in the computer science world that we were not seeing publicly. But November 30 changed that.

That was an inflection point, and this is why I think it’s so transformative. AI and machine learning are 2 different terms, but we won’t dissect those. A lot of the work previous to what the public sees has been machine learning. You take a bunch of data, stick it in a black box and out comes something. And that something is usually a prediction.

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