> "AI" is basically a vast, curated, compressed database with a powerful index. If the database reflects the current state of the art, it'll have better understanding than the majority of human practitioners.

But it's not. You're missing the point entirely and don't know what you're advocating for.

A dictionary contains all the words necessary to describe any concept and rudimentary definitions to help you string sentences together but you wouldn't have a doctor diagnose someone's medical condition with a dictionary, despite the fact that it contains most if not all of the concepts necessary to describe and diagnose any disease. It's useful information, but not organized in a way that is conducive to the task at hand.

I assume based on the way you're describing AI that you're referring to LLMs broadly, which, again, are spicy autocorrect. Super simplified, they're just big masses of understanding of what things might come in what order, what words or concepts have proximity to one another, and what words and sentences look like. They lack (and really cannot develop) the ability to perform acts of deductive reasoning, to come up with creative or new ideas, or to actually understand the answers they're giving. If they connect a bunch of irrelevant dots they will not second guess their answer if something seems off. They will not consult with other experts to get outside opinions on biases or details they overlooked or missed. They have no concept of details. They have no concept of expertise. They cannot ask questions to get you to expand on vague things you said that a doctor has intuition might be important

The idea that you could type some symptoms into ChatGPT and get a reasonable diagnosis is foolish beyond comprehension. ChatGPT cannot reliably count the number of letters in a word. If it gives you an answer you don't like and you say that's wrong it will instantly correct itself, and sometimes still give you the wrong answer in direct contradiction to what you said. Have you used google, lately? Gemini AI summaries at the tops of the search results often contain misleading or completely incorrect information.

ChatGPT isn't poring over medical literature and trying to find references to things that sound like what you described and then drawing conclusions, it's just finding groups of letters with proximity to the ones you gave it (without any concept of what the medical field is.) ChatGPT is a machine that gives you an answer in the (impressively close, no doubt) shape of the answer you'd expect when asked a question that incorporates massive amounts of irrelevant data from all sorts of places (including, for example, snake oil alternative medicine sites and conspiracy theory content) that are also being considered as part of your answer.

AI undoubtedly has a place in medicine, in the sorts of contexts it's already being used in. Specialized machine learning algorithms can be trained to examine medical imaging and detect patterns that look like cancers that humans might miss. Algorithms can be trained to identify or detect warning signs for diseases divined from analyses of large numbers of specific cases. This stuff is real, already in the field, and I'm not experienced enough in the space to know how well it works, but it's the stuff that has real promise.

LLMs are not general artificial intelligence. They're prompted text generators that are largely being tuned as a consumer product that sells itself on the basis of the fact that it feels impressive. Every single time I've seen someone try to apply one to any field of experienced knowledge work they either give up using it for anything but the most simple tasks, because it's bad at the things it's done, or the user winds up Dunning-Kreugering themselves into not learning anything.

If you are seriously asking ChatGPT for medical diagnoses, for your own sake, stop it. Go to an actual doctor. I am not at all suggesting that the current state of healthcare anywhere in particular is perfect but the solution is not to go ask your toaster if you have cancer.