by jacquesm | 2025-09-07 19:51:41+00:00
You wrote:

"This is awesome. Great use of AI to realize an idea. Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI.

It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that."

Let's take that bit by bit then if you find it hard to correlate.

> This is awesome.

Agreed, it is a very neat demonstration of what you can do with domain knowledge married to powerful technology.

> Great use of AI to realize an idea.

This idea, while a good one, is not at all novel and does not require vibe coding or LLMs in any way, but it does rely on a lot of progress in image classification in the last decade or so if you want to take it to the next level. Just training people on a limited set of images is not going to do much of anything other than to inject noise into the system.

> Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI.

Well.. yes and no. It is a hopeful thing but it doesn't really help when releasing it bypasses the whole review system that we have in place for classifying medical devices. And make no mistake: this is a medical diagnostic device and it will be used by people as such even if it wasn't intended as such. There is a fair chance that the program - vibe coded, remember? - has not been reviewed and tested to the degree that a medical device normally would be and that there has been no extensive testing in the field to determine what the effect on patient outcomes of such an education program is. This is a difficult and tricky topic which ultimately boils down to a long - and possibly expensive - path on the road to being able to release such a thing responsibly.

> It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades

As I wrote, I'm familiar with quite a few startups in this domain. Education and image classification + medical domain knowledge is - and was - investable and has been for a long time. But it is not a simple proposition.

> and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that.

Hardly anybody that I'm aware of - besides the Trump administration - currently opposes fighting cancer, there are veritable armies of scientists in academia and outside of it doing just that. This particular kind of cancer is low hanging fruit because (1) it is externally visible and (2) there is a fair amount of training data available already. But even with those advantages the hard problems, statistics, and ultimately the net balance in patient outcomes if you start using the tool at scale are where the harsh reality sets in: solving this problem for the 80% of easy to classify cases is easy by definition. The remaining 20% are hard, even for experts, more so for a piece of software or a person trained by a piece of software. Even a percentage point or two shift in the confusion matrix can turn a potentially useful tool into a useless one or vice versa.

That's the problem that people are trying to solve, not the image classification basics and/or patient education, no matter how useful these are when used in conjunction with proper medical processes.

But props to the author for building it and releasing it, I'm pretty curious about what the long term effect of this is, I will definitely be following the effort.

Better like that?