Are AI tools making doctors worse at their jobs?

Physicians are using the technology for diagnoses and more — but may be losing skills in the process

- Teddy Rosenbluth

In the past few years, studies have described the many ways AI 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 AI may have a hidden cost.

A study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that after just three months of using an AI 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 AI 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 AI inputs that affect its output, but it also it seems to affect our behaviour as well.” The study began like many AI trials in medicine. Doctors at four endoscopy centres in Poland were given access to an AI 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.