Berlin.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) warns of a risky spread of medical AI offers online. That is the reason.
In view of the current advances in the field of artificial intelligence, Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach warns of a risky spread of unregulated medical AI offers on the internet: “There will soon be programs in which a patient verbally explains symptoms, findings and previous treatments and then gets an assessment of his illness and even possible therapy suggestions from the AI,” said the SPD politician to this editorial team. AI bots like ChatGPT are extremely attractive to patients when they are developed for medical applications. “My concern is that in this way a wild offer will develop on the Internet that is completely unregulated.”
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Lauterbach wants to regulate the use of AI systems in the healthcare sector
The Minister of Health called for the use of AI systems such as ChatGPT in the health sector necessarily to be regulated. “They have to be checked and they have to be reliable,” says Lauterbach. It must also be ensured that the data cannot be misused. “It must not be the case that we protect the data of German patients perfectly as part of the digital patient file, but the same data is used and possibly misused by American companies with the help of commercial AI chat applications.”
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Basically, he sees the use of AI in the healthcare system positively: Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are incredibly versatile. They may soon not only be able to make diagnoses and provide disease prognosis. You could, like this Lauterbach, theoretically run through therapies in the future and answer questions about the effectiveness of medication for a specific patient. According to Lauterbach, artificial intelligence can sometimes be better than a trained specialist. “But the best results are achieved with a combination of artificial intelligence and a doctor.” (fmg)
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