TUCSON, Ariz., Aug. 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine is portrayed as either a gateway to a golden era or a route to hell. In the fall issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Jane M. Orient, M.D., cuts through the hype to objectively weigh this technology's true benefits against its real-world risks. She explains that current Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are mere “stochastic parrots,” i.e.: probabilistic engines that guess the answers based on massive datasets of human text. Those models are not connected to physical reality or objective truth and are subject to frequent “hallucinations,” which are not fixable software glitches, but an inherent feature.
While these models evolve too fast for detailed evaluation, their core architecture remains the same: they are simply pattern replicators prone to bias and factual errors, Dr. Orient writes.
There may be great gains in current productivity, but “cognitive outsourcing” may result in a decline in human capabilities, she warns.
Dr. Orient highlights positive and negative experiences with AI. Areas of successful implementation include surgical pathology, laboratory medicine, and diagnostic imaging. An important risk is the “false positive paradox,” in which screening a vast population of healthy persons produces a massive number of false positives despite a highly accurate test.
Perhaps the most universally appealing application of AI for the general practitioner is the ambient AI scribe. It “listens” to the patient-physician encounter and generates a clinical note. Because of privacy concerns, Dr. Orient states that “the tool that is intended to be invisible often becomes the most disruptive object in the examination room.”
AI-generated literature and fake citations are causing a crisis in medical publishing, contaminating the evidence base, Dr. Orient cautions.
She concludes that AI is neither panacea nor apocalypse, but a powerful tool needing close human supervision.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.
Contact: Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@gmail.com
