Even big banks and venture capital funds now worry that their enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is fueling a huge bubble—but it seems they haven't gotten the memo to Arianna Huffington. The onetime media maven and current wellness tech CEO returned to her blogging roots this week to co-author a Time magazine op-ed with OpenAI's Sam Altman, who described a “personal Announced a co-investment in a customized, hyper-personalized AI health coach that will be branded and marketed under Huffington's Thrive Global Startup.
“It will be trained on peer-to-peer science. as well as Thrive's behavior change methodology,” the two write. “And it will also be trained on the personal biometric, lab, and other medical data you choose to share with it. ” (Interesting words, there.)
The app-based bot will train itself to understand your daily health habits, from your vaccination status to your sleep patterns to your soft drink consumption, in order to “predict daily habits. The life-saving benefits of improving and addressing increased health can be scaled and democratized.” It seems harmless enough and idealistic, in keeping with Huffington's focus on “microsteps” for sustainable health behaviors—that is, making small changes in your daily habits to replace harmful health practices with beneficial ones. can be changed to Bots in anything/everything.
(As an aside: the op-ed has a disclosure at the bottom about OpenAI's licensing agreement with Time magazine; specifically, the news site formerly known as the Huffington Post has moved to GPT-powered (Oh yeah, and current owner Marc Benioff invested in Thrive Global anyway.)
Harnessing technological innovation to fix our flawed, underfunded, inefficient, and overcapitalized health care system is certainly a laudable goal. More app functionality may not seem like an obvious solution, though: The over-computerization of healthcare has led to unhelpful changes in workflow processes and medical tech management for doctors, as Atul Gawande writes. is – not least by increasing the vulnerability of hospitals. For catastrophic cyber attacks.
Yet field professionals also cite positive changes in incorporating machine learning algorithms to speed up time-sucking tasks like administrative file management, speech transcription, data scanning for diagnostics, and drug discovery. Virginia Rep. Jennifer Wexton, who lost the use of her voice last year after a sudden onset of progressive supranuclear palsy, has also demonstrated an AI-generated voice replica that she can now use for everyday communication. . Advanced robotic prosthetics are already on the market for amputees. There are so many possibilities for AI when it comes to communication. Definitely Healthcare branches, provided we still don't rely too much on flawed algorithms.
However, I'm not convinced that Ariana Huffington and Sam Altman are the only ones leading humanity to this next frontier.
To begin with, it's worth treating—dare I say—with any of Huffington's wellness initiatives. healthy Food of doubt. In the early days of HuffPost, then-Editor-in-Chief Ariana Huffington famously featured several celebrities (including the now-potential election-spoiler candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) in raunchy cartoons promoting the ever-suspicious. Gave enough space to write. Links between vaccines and autism. But the Huffington Post's health pseudoscience was hardly limited to spreading the anti-vax conspiracy, which is still wreaking havoc on public health through COVID misinformation and the resurgence of diseases like measles and even polio. Until his departure in 2016, Huffington used the publication under his name to publish false claims, such as how cigarettes do not causes cancer, while directly interfering with reporting that has (correctly) questioned the efficacy of the popular “12-step program” for addiction recovery.
(While HuffPost has generally done an excellent job, it did publish a surprising op-ed a few weeks ago that suggested AI helped President Joe Biden's campaign reach distraught voters after that terrible debate. (Can help. Yeah, I'm not sure that's going to happen. Fix Biden's reputational crisis.)
For Thrive Global, Huffington hosts an online community whose members often publish articles that traffic in myths about “alternative” COVID treatments and prioritize Huffington's focus on “mindsets.” (a view that is at best simplistic. and at worst misleading) as a mechanism to focus on. She's also happy to endorse famous friends like Gwyneth Paltrow, whose Goop wellness brand sells horribly inappropriate products.
A number of analyzes have also cast doubt on the efficacy of “nudge theory” — targeted incentives to affect behavioral changes — that Huffington and Altman cite in a Time article as a benefit of their proposed health coach. Another recent study by Australian academics examined insurance company Discovery Limited and found its approach to pricing health premiums through “hyper-personalization” best suited to Thrive AI behavioral tracking. Is.
Given that track record, any AI health bot awarded Huffington's Premier and integrated “within Thrive Global's enterprise products” warrants considerable scrutiny. Indeed, when she was pushing the concept of an AI-powered “wellness copilot” on Bloomberg TV in February, she cited BJ Fogg, a controversial behavioral scientist and advisor to Thrive, a social Credit for influencing media platforms. Embrace their most addictive functions – like the person who knows how to get Thrive's “copilot” to, uh, combat the negative mental health effects of doomscrolling?
Sam Altman, of course, has his own weird medical obsessions, from his eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency WorldCoin to his life-extension moonshots. Still, credit where it's due: OpenAI this week forged another relationship with Los Alamos Labs — yes, the OG atomic bomb developer — which bluntly described the potential for misuse of ChatGPT to “provide information “And some OpenAI health partners, like Rhode Island's Lifespan Hospital, seem genuinely excited about their technology's applications.” , while other doctors are independently deploying ChatGPT to quickly process patient claims that insurance companies rely on algorithms to process. Will not End rejection. I say this in all seriousness: it's so clean!
That's not to say that some of the medical AI arguments that Altman and Huffington make in the ed aren't inherently flawed. One is the claim that this Thrive coach will have “a superhuman long-term memory” when most AI models, no matter how advanced, still struggle with data/training/learning memory bandwidth and consistency. . For another, the valid observation that “chronic diseases … are unevenly distributed across the population,” combined with the utopia of AI is scaled to New Deal levels of “a healthy, It makes it easier to make healthy changes by doing things like prescribing cheap. A recipe that can be made quickly with just a few ingredients.
You know what else is unevenly distributed in demographics? Basic technological access to everything from healthcare infrastructure to functional grocery stores to smartphones, computers and internet bandwidth. (According to a recent paper by nine leading British cancer experts, further tech disruptions mean that AI “may impose additional barriers for people with poor digital or health literacy.”) Also, fossil fuel plants that has poisoned and sickened countless minority neighborhoods but only Is All of this AI will be put to work because of – wait for it – the energy needs of the data centers used to train it.
More to the point, can an “AI coach” really overcome inequality when racial bias is already embedded? So Many AI algorithms and health data used in training, inputs and outputs? Emphasizing a “behavioral” approach to addressing systemic health inequities already sounds like a fancy version of “personal responsibility” rhetoric before you add the modern age of this magic bullet tech. Enter ways to eliminate inequality.
By the way, who does Sam Altman think he is, to promise that he's going to fulfill all these lofty goals? Should we credit it as a “miracle cure” for mental health when low-wage Kenyan workers rid Chet GPT of toxins, their traumatic working experiences and anyone Relief from their competent boss? Does a CEO who allegedly deploys oppressive employee guidelines and psychological abuse tactics in his workplace really care about empowering everyone to adopt healthy daily habits? Is Altman really the one who is “providing assurances that these technologies are reliable and [users’] Personal health data will be handled responsibly,” in light of how OpenAI has failed to fulfill that task? The company denies the source. training data for its own models Responsibly, and whose chatbots have leaked users' private information and can't even properly connect to the websites whose archives they're supposedly linked to?
Look, I hope you all use this article on Thrive and OpenAI to train your health coach, because then at least one Opportunity It will tell the truth about what it, and its founders, will actually be able to do for Americans. The patient