Myself and my classmates (respiratory therapy) use AI to put together study guides, flash cards, and practice tests for us, using our lecture recordings, notes, and PowerPoints as reference material. It hasn’t hallucinated anything incorrect into our study guides. I’m no fan of LLMs and the like by any means but it’s been a huge time saver in this capacity. Less time spent formatting bullshit means more time for studying
Medical student here. Some of my classmates did the same thing with summaries and study guides and it scrambled a couple of fine but extremely important details. The mistake meant that my classmate mixed up two presentations of neurological problems, one of which is transient and fixable with medications and the other is something that can rapidly become lethal if not recognized fast enough.
RT’s are precious resources for physicians, but the stakes for us fucking up are profoundly higher. (And if the RT does something wrong and the patient suffers harm, it’s still likely to land on the physician to some extent in terms of liability.)
I get that, but to a degree it’s also on the student for not verifying the output either. One of my classmates has dyslexia (he does the flashcard sets) and makes frequent errors. Thankfully our class shares the burden of making study materials because we all act as a filter of sorts for him. Helping him notice the errors before he commits them to memory, and allowing us to have them edited with correct information. Same goes for AI stuff, you gotta double check it. Editing a few lines is still a lot quicker than creating these resources from scratch
The problem is that most people don’t double check or they check a couple things then think “good enough”, and turn off the critical thinking part of their brain. That’s how lawyers ended up submitting a case brief with fake case citations. The “citations” look real enough, but to verify it, you have to go read the source yourself.
This goes for people citing studies without reading them first. There are a lot of studies that squidge the numbers around to make things look better and you have to look for things like how they parsed the data for the results and conclusions. I’ve personally made pharma reps very uncomfortable by digging into things like how they did or did not parse complications by sex (ie one complication was parsed by sex, but the other was combined)
I may only be in a respiratory therapy program, but I’ve been an EMT for 10 years prior to that. If that experience is worth anything, I’d say verifying information before making a clinical decision is a far more important habit to build than memorizing two obscure values for a test (that you’ll almost certainly forget by the time you’re a licensed physician).
An AI study guide is liable to make mistakes, but the bigger problem here is a prospective physician who can’t be bothered to make sure that they had the correct information before acting on it. Ditto for the lawyers or researchers relying on AI to do the work for them (an inappropriate use of AI imo). Throwing a practice test together and drafting legal paperwork/writing an academic piece are planets apart
The AI alleviates the process of critical thinking though. I make my own review notebooks for my boards and for clinical rotations by taking the time to figure out what’s important and what I don’t know to put those things in my notebooks. I write these out by hand on paper, so I have to be judicious about what is going to actually be important, and just the process of making those priorities helps me to have a better understanding of my own deficiencies.
Making a good study guide requires critical thinking skills, and if that gets outsourced to AI, that means the critical thinking isn’t being done by the human that needs to learn that skill.
I feel like people are overly antagonistic towards the technology, when the ire really should be directed at the companies. The tech has problems, like all tech does, but it also has its uses. Saw someone earlier today that had created a newsfeed with headlines rewritten to not be clickbaity bullshit.
Myself and my classmates (respiratory therapy) use AI to put together study guides, flash cards, and practice tests for us, using our lecture recordings, notes, and PowerPoints as reference material. It hasn’t hallucinated anything incorrect into our study guides. I’m no fan of LLMs and the like by any means but it’s been a huge time saver in this capacity. Less time spent formatting bullshit means more time for studying
Medical student here. Some of my classmates did the same thing with summaries and study guides and it scrambled a couple of fine but extremely important details. The mistake meant that my classmate mixed up two presentations of neurological problems, one of which is transient and fixable with medications and the other is something that can rapidly become lethal if not recognized fast enough.
RT’s are precious resources for physicians, but the stakes for us fucking up are profoundly higher. (And if the RT does something wrong and the patient suffers harm, it’s still likely to land on the physician to some extent in terms of liability.)
I get that, but to a degree it’s also on the student for not verifying the output either. One of my classmates has dyslexia (he does the flashcard sets) and makes frequent errors. Thankfully our class shares the burden of making study materials because we all act as a filter of sorts for him. Helping him notice the errors before he commits them to memory, and allowing us to have them edited with correct information. Same goes for AI stuff, you gotta double check it. Editing a few lines is still a lot quicker than creating these resources from scratch
The problem is that most people don’t double check or they check a couple things then think “good enough”, and turn off the critical thinking part of their brain. That’s how lawyers ended up submitting a case brief with fake case citations. The “citations” look real enough, but to verify it, you have to go read the source yourself.
This goes for people citing studies without reading them first. There are a lot of studies that squidge the numbers around to make things look better and you have to look for things like how they parsed the data for the results and conclusions. I’ve personally made pharma reps very uncomfortable by digging into things like how they did or did not parse complications by sex (ie one complication was parsed by sex, but the other was combined)
I may only be in a respiratory therapy program, but I’ve been an EMT for 10 years prior to that. If that experience is worth anything, I’d say verifying information before making a clinical decision is a far more important habit to build than memorizing two obscure values for a test (that you’ll almost certainly forget by the time you’re a licensed physician).
An AI study guide is liable to make mistakes, but the bigger problem here is a prospective physician who can’t be bothered to make sure that they had the correct information before acting on it. Ditto for the lawyers or researchers relying on AI to do the work for them (an inappropriate use of AI imo). Throwing a practice test together and drafting legal paperwork/writing an academic piece are planets apart
The AI alleviates the process of critical thinking though. I make my own review notebooks for my boards and for clinical rotations by taking the time to figure out what’s important and what I don’t know to put those things in my notebooks. I write these out by hand on paper, so I have to be judicious about what is going to actually be important, and just the process of making those priorities helps me to have a better understanding of my own deficiencies.
Making a good study guide requires critical thinking skills, and if that gets outsourced to AI, that means the critical thinking isn’t being done by the human that needs to learn that skill.
I feel like people are overly antagonistic towards the technology, when the ire really should be directed at the companies. The tech has problems, like all tech does, but it also has its uses. Saw someone earlier today that had created a newsfeed with headlines rewritten to not be clickbaity bullshit.