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(Disclaimer, I’m using gpt 3.5 or whatever is publicly available.) This week I used ChatGPT to help “diagnose” a medical issue my senior dog has developed with

(Disclaimer, I’m using gpt 3.5 or whatever is publicly available.) This week I used ChatGPT to help “diagnose” a medical issue my senior dog has developed with his eye. We noticed he very suddenly started walking into furniture, and his left eye has become sunken and half covered by his third eyelid. Our small town’s farm vet wasn’t equipped to deal with eye issues, and the second vet we saw was understaffed so they had a traveling vet in for the day look at our dog. We weren’t impressed after he couldn’t figure out how to work his eye examination tool (he was looking through it backwards at first, shining the light into his own eye) and then gave up and just prescribed an antibiotic/ointment to our dog and told us to come back in a week. Obviously we’ve tried to google the symptoms, but I’d heard anecdotes of people feeding their own medical issues into ChatGPT and getting good feedback, so I figured I’d do the same with my dog. It gave me a ton of detailed data about five different things that could be causing the problem with his eye. I questioned it about each one, and it tried to rule out some of the causes to the best of its ability when I was able to fill in details about things it asked. All the while it cautioned me that a vet would need to test him to truly determine if one of these things were the problem. We’re heading back to the vet tomorrow for his recheck, ready to ask about a couple of these things. I’ve been very bearish on ChatGPT and LLMs, but it’s been genuinely useful to me in this situation. I’m still a little cautious about the info it gave me though, because I’m still thinking about all the times I’ve played with it and had it give me broken lua/f# code or kusto queries that call functions which simply don’t exist. This could easily be one of those situations where I’m not a veterinarian so I can’t easily spot any of the wrong or misinformed information it gave me. Edit: the five conditions it listed that could have caused the sudden eye problem for my dog are entropion; ectropion; enophthalmos; glaucoma; trauma.

golergka 3y ago
I've tried GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 since it's release. GPT-4 is such a fantastic improvement in terms of getting the facts right that I can't remember when was the last time it had misremembered things. And just a couple of days ago they released the version with web search, and now I always ask it to search for information instead of trying to remember it, or at least to search to confirm that it remembers things right. Sadly, search seems pretty unstable for now. But it's still a completely unique, once in a lifetime technology. I can't compare it to anything less than internet in terms of potential impact.
HeavyFeather 3y ago
Same. I described my dizziness and pointed me to BPPV and 4 others that were quickly filtered out. I also asked how to further diagnose the issue and pointed me to some maneuvers. I then searched them on YouTube and I was fine 3 days later (this stuff can stick around for months) Diagnosis is probably going to be one of the most impactful uses. Even if then you have to head to an actual doctor to confirm, it's good to have a possible lead. We've been using Google for the same purpose for a decade but with much worse results, this is a step up.

golergka 3y ago

I've tried GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 since it's release. GPT-4 is such a fantastic improvement in terms of getting the facts right that I can't remember when was the last time it had misremembered things. And just a couple of days ago they released the version with web search, and now I always ask it to search for information instead of trying to remember it, or at least to search to confirm that it remembers things right. Sadly, search seems pretty unstable for now. But it's still a completely unique, once in a lifetime technology. I can't compare it to anything less than internet in terms of potential impact.

HeavyFeather 3y ago

Same. I described my dizziness and pointed me to BPPV and 4 others that were quickly filtered out. I also asked how to further diagnose the issue and pointed me to some maneuvers. I then searched them on YouTube and I was fine 3 days later (this stuff can stick around for months) Diagnosis is probably going to be one of the most impactful uses. Even if then you have to head to an actual doctor to confirm, it's good to have a possible lead. We've been using Google for the same purpose for a decade but with much worse results, this is a step up.