Artificial intelligence tools used by doctors risk leading to worse health outcomes for women and ethnic minorities, as a growing body of research shows that many large language models downplay the symptoms of these patients.
A series of recent studies have found that the uptake of AI models across the healthcare sector could lead to biased medical decisions, reinforcing patterns of under treatment that already exist across different groups in western societies.
The findings by researchers at leading US and UK universities suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less “empathy” towards Black and Asian ones.