Are A.I. Tools Making Doctors Worse at Their Jobs?

Well|Are A.I. Tools Making Doctors Worse at Their Jobs?

In the past few years, studies have described the many ways A.I. tools have made doctors better at their jobs: It’s aided them in spotting cancer, allowed them to make diagnoses faster and in some cases, helped them more accurately predict who’s at risk of complications.

But new research suggests that collaborating with A.I. may have a hidden cost.

A study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that after just three months of using an A.I. tool designed to help spot precancerous growths during colonoscopies, doctors were significantly worse at finding the growths on their own.

This is the first evidence that relying on A.I. tools might erode a doctor’s ability to perform fundamental skills without the technology, a phenomenon known as “deskilling.”

“This is a two-way process,” said Dr. Omer Ahmad, a gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London who published an editorial alongside the study. “We give A.I. inputs that affect its output, but it also seems to affect our behavior as well.”

The study began like many A.I. trials in medicine. Doctors at four endoscopy centers in Poland were given access to an A.I. tool that flagged suspicious growths while they performed a colonoscopy, drawing a box around them in real time. Several other large clinical trials have shown this technology significantly improves doctors’ detection rate of precancerous growths, a widely accepted indicator of an endoscopist’s performance.

Then, unlike in past studies, the researchers measured what happened when the tool was taken away.

In the three months before the technology was introduced, the doctors spotted growths in about 28 percent of colonoscopies. Now, the detection rate had fallen to about 22 percent — well below their base line.