Medicine May Be an Art, But AI May Be Artists

By Kim Bellard, October 28, 2021

Six hundred years ago, Swiss physician/scientist/philosopher Paracelsus disclaimed: “Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art.” Medicine, most people in healthcare still believe, takes not just intelligence and fact-based decision-making, but also intuition, creativity, and empathy. This duality is often cited as a reason artificial intelligence (A.I.) will never replace human physicians.

Perhaps those skeptics have not heard about Ai-Da.

Named in honor of famed 19th century mathematician/ programmer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da is “the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist.” She was created in 2019, and uses AI algorithms to create art with her cameras/eyes and her bionic arms. She can draw, paint, even sculpt, and had her first major exhibit — Ai-Da: Portrait of the Robot — this summer at London’s Design Museum.

Lest anything think Ai-Da is a one-off, I’d also point to Xiaoice, a Microsoft-built, China-based AI chatbot that is “a poet, a painter, a TV presenter, a news pundit, and a lot more.”

There are other AI artists besides Ai-Da and Xia. If AI-produced art isn’t impressive enough, earlier this year AI was used to finish Beethoven’s famous unfinished 10th symphony, synthesizing all his other works and his notes, and using them to create something he might have written. The completed symphony had its world premiere earlier this month.

Healthcare certainly hasn’t been ignoring AI. Every day it seems there are more announcements about AI-powered innovations, as well as funding for AI-based companies with a health focus.

Just week, researchers at the University of Utah Health/Rady Children’s Hospital reported they’d used AI to parse massive amounts of genetic data to diagnose rare pediatric disorders, in a way humans never could have. AI is already also increasingly important in drug discovery, and numerous health systems are implementing their own AI-based initiatives, such as a Stanford University Medical Center/Microsoft project on medical imaging datasets and a Mayo Clinic/Google AI algorithm for treatment of brain diseases.

Last year alone the FDA approved 100 AI/ML (machine learning) devices, with radiology being the big leader, according to a Politico analysis; as Dr. Eric Topel likes to say, it is the “sweet spot of AI.”

Lenovo’s Sinisa Nikolic believes: “AI is set to transform the future of healthcare,” although he offers the usual cautions: “In all aspects of healthcare, you will always need human-human contact and interaction. Humans have empathy; machines cannot replace that. AI will help us be better, stronger, and healthier.”

Not everyone is as conservative. Kai-Fu Li, author of AI Superpowers, predicts: “I anticipate diagnostic AI will surpass all but the best doctors in the next 20 years.”

Healthcare has come a long way with its acceptance of healthcare, from initially rejecting it, of course, to the now common mindset that, yes, it could be a great help, helping automate common tasks and augmenting clinicians. But crossing that line between augmenting and replacing is hard for many to accept.

We can accept AI being good at the “science” part of medicine, but we’ve yet to be convinced it could be good at the “art” part of it. But, as Ai-Da and other AI artists are illustrating, it’s something we’re going to have to face.

Ai-Da’s website warns: “If Ai-Da does just one important thing, it would be to get us considering the blurring of human/machine relations, and encouraging us to think more carefully and slowly about the choices we make for our future.”

Let’s hope healthcare thinks carefully — but not too slowly — about the choices AI offers us for the future.

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)