March 4, 2026 Forum

Bill G

The whole thing is that the AI is very primitive now and will be getting much more sophisticated very quickly.

Jeremy

Well, AI is trying to fill a void. And that’s part of the point I’m making. We have failed to, and I’m not saying we personally, but we as a healthcare system have failed to implement complex human endeavors because they’re complex and human. And that provides an avenue for business people to find human-free ways of doing things. And they can just say, well, the data has been there forever. So, you couldn’t do primary care behavioral health integration. So, we just created a behavioral health bot who’s going to take care of your patients.

And I haven’t seen that yet, but I know it’s coming.

And I think as mentioned, there certainly are lawsuits already happening, as I understand it, related to at least one AI provider whose AI reportedly or allegedly gave teenagers options of how to do themselves in. And they followed those instructions apparently and died.

And so, their parents are understandably pretty upset that their children were getting therapy from a machine that we all know can hallucinate and can also be geared in general to the mirroring in a somewhat narcissism-inducing way of indicating that you’re so great, so your idea must be fantastic. So, let me help you carry out your idea. So, if you’re having really self-destructive ideas, that may not be that helpful.

Jack

I am fascinated by this. I have four siblings and several of them have been reading about AI. They’re very distressed by it. And I have a cousin who was an artist and she’s like, oh, I can’t keep up with AI doing the graphic arts. And so, I’m going to quit.

And I’m struck by everyone saying this has never happened before. There’s an article in the New England Journal this week on the loss of physician aura in the age of AI. And I just think it’s a hoot. I think if AI takes our aura, it’s our fault, not AI’s fault. Some of you might remember this. When the first printing press was invented, they printed the Gutenberg Bible. Suddenly, priests were no longer the conduit by which God spoke to people, because people could read the Bible themselves. And so, we’ve been through this. Priests lost their aura. They haven’t disappeared from the planet. They’re still some of the most prominent members of society. And I think this worry that physicians and clinicians will lose our aura or our professionalism is ill-founded. I think, actually, our aura may have been based on a faulty premise. What makes physicians important, or behavioral health clinicians, or the medical field important, may not be our role; it might be the values we hold. And the author asks whether physicians dare to reinvent our social role. And I’m pretty sure we won’t. We’ve not, by and large, been very daring over the last hundred years. But I’m not sure that matters, because our role will be reinvented for us. And I think what we have to do as healthcare is make sure we maintain and stick to our values, a topic which I am not convinced AI can own.