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.
Okay cool, that’s not what’s happening here.
These aren’t “vibe doctors.” They’re trained oncologists and radiologists. They have the skill to do this without the new tool, but if they don’t practice it, that skill gets worse. Surprise.
For comparison: can you code without a compiler? Are you practiced? It used to be fundamental. There must be e-mails lamenting that students rely on this newfangled high-level language called C. Those kids’ programs were surely slower… and ten times easier to write and debug. At some point, relying on a technology becomes much smarter than demonstrating you don’t need it.
If doctors using this tool detect cancer more reliably, they’re better doctors. You would not pick someone old-fashioned to feel around and reckon about your lump, even if they were the best in the world at discerning tumors by feel. You’d get an MRI. And you’d want it looked-at by whatever process has the best detection rates. Human eyeballs might be in second place.
I never implied they are vibe doctors? Its just a comment on my annoying experience, don’t read to much into it.
“Concerning that the same is happening in medical even for the experts.”
It isn’t.
Glad we cleared that up?
Yes indeed, AI problems. Glad we cleared it up.
No. You’re making a faulty comparison. The thing in this article is exclusively for experts. Using it made them better doctors, but when they stopped using it, they were out-of-practice at the old way. Like any skill you stop exercising. Especially at an expert level. Your junior programmers incompetently trusting LLMs is not the same problem in any direction.
This is genuinely important, because people are developing prejudice against an entire branch of computer science. This stupid headline pretends AI made cancer detection worse. Cancer’s kind of a big deal! Disguising the fact that detection rates improved with this tool, by fixating on how they got worse without it, may cost lives.
A lot of people in this thread are theatrically advocating the importance of deep understanding of complex subjects, and then giving a kneejerk “fuckin’ AI, am I right?”
I never said it’s the same but ok. Pointless argument.
You literally did.
“Concerning that the same is happening in medical even for the experts.”