The Life-Threatening Consequences of Overhyping AI

On February 11, The New York Times published a story with the headline "AI Shows Promise Assisting Physicians." While the article focused on a scientific paper showing how an artificial intelligence system could help doctors diagnose certain conditions, it missed a key part of the AI story: Accuracy does not equal impact. Arijit Sengupta is founder and CEO of Aible, a stealth-mode startup that creates AI for businesses. As the Times wrote, the AI software "was more than 90 percent accurate at diagnosing asthma; the accuracy of physicians in the study ranged from 80 to 94 percent. In diagnosing gastrointestinal disease, the system was 87 percent accurate, compared with the physicians' accuracy of 82 to 90 percent."