• A study found that humans didn’t trust medical advice when its source was labelled as AI.
• Survey respondents said they didn’t trust AI as it was dehumanising.
• Work needs to be done if healthcare practitioners want to incorporate AI into their activities given the mistrust of the technology.

Over the last few years, we’ve heard wonderful things about what artificial intelligence can accomplish, what with the incredible ability to parse gigabytes of data in mere seconds. However, while folks may be willing to have AI draft essays for them or even get them to work on time, they don’t trust it when it comes to matters of health and wellbeing.

Research published in Nature Medicine last month presented 2 280 participants with scenarios of patients getting medical advice. This advice was labelled as coming from one of three sources: AI, human physicians and AI overseen by physicians.

The study found that when advice is said to come from AI or an AI overseen by a physician, humans distrust that advice and instead, trust the advice labelled as coming from a human more than the bot.

Participants said they view AI as dehumanising and worry that their individual characteristics aren’t included in the data the AI is drawing from. This may not be the case but it’s a perception that speaks to the general attitude toward AI.

What’s interesting is that the quality of the data dispensed isn’t in question here but rather where it’s said to be coming from.

“Our findings indicate a bias against medical advice labeled as AI-generated, regardless of additional supervision by human physicians. Along the same lines, previous research has shown that the public’s reservations toward medical AI persist even when AI-generated content is medically supervised,” reads the study.

“Considering the expected surge of AI in healthcare and the immense potential for human–AI collaboration, this finding raises notable concerns. To address this bias, in addition to the general public, other stakeholders, such as physicians and insurance providers, will need to be engaged accordingly. Interestingly, another study showed that if people were assured that humans would remain unequivocally in the decision-making position, the combination of human and AI achieved significantly higher levels of trust than without this assurance. Consequently, the specific framing of the involvement of AI in generating and delivering medical advice may be pivotal for its public acceptance.”

AI can have some tangible benefits in the health sector, especially locally. South Africa’s geography and the Apartheid regime’s spatial planning and segregation that still persists to this day mean quality and affordable healthcare is out of reach for many citizens. However, if folks don’t trust the advice they are being given by AI, that could prove to be a stalling point for the technology.

Truth be told, AI has a ways to go before it can be trusted for even the most basic of tasks without human supervision. The technology is prone to hallucinations, some more dangerous than others. While work is being done to address these made up and ill informed responses, it make sense that folks would approach anything with an AI label with trepidation.

There’s also the history of emerging tech over the last few years to consider.

We’ve cycled through cryptocurrency, blockchain for everything, the metaverse, and NFTs as the “next big thing” over the last few years. Each of these has failed to reach a critical mass of users and were leveraged for illicit activities. This has bred a culture of mistrust when it comes to the tech du jour and AI has suffered because of that legacy.

How the AI bigwigs shift that narrative is unclear but it may already be too late.

Investors who poured money into AI developments are starting to look for the profits they were promised and right now, AI isn’t really profitable. The folks driving the investment would tell you otherwise and that it’s simply a matter of time before we all start using AI. We’d remind you that Mark Zuckerberg was talking up his Metaverse constantly, until it faded into obscurity along with the billions Meta ploughed into the project.