Text to avoid paywall
The Food and Drug Administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to “radically increase efficiency” in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, one of several top priorities laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA.
Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other “concerning ingredients” that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count.
“The F.D.A. will be focused on delivering faster cures and meaningful treatments for patients, especially those with neglected and rare diseases, healthier food for children and common-sense approaches to rebuild the public trust,” Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner, and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who leads the division that oversees vaccines and gene therapy, wrote in the JAMA article.
The agency plays a central role in pursuing the agenda of the U.S. health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it has already begun to press food makers to eliminate artificial food dyes. The new road map also underscores the Trump administration’s efforts to smooth the way for major industries with an array of efforts aimed at getting products to pharmacies and store shelves quickly.
Some aspects of the proposals outlined in JAMA were met with skepticism, particularly the idea that artificial intelligence is up to the task of shearing months or years from the painstaking work of examining applications that companies submit when seeking approval for a drug or high-risk medical device.
“I don’t want to be dismissive of speeding reviews at the F.D.A.,” said Stephen Holland, a lawyer who formerly advised the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on health care. “I think that there is great potential here, but I’m not seeing the beef yet.”
The same people who do everything they can to obstruct actual science, including research into vaccines and other medicines. ChatGPT can surely do what actual scientists and experienced health professionals can do. After all, ChatGPT can predict what word a person is likely to say next, so do a convincing impression of someone who knows about medicine. It’s probably no coincidence that many of these people are grifters in their own right, and those who aren’t are suckers for grifters. They have basic problems appreciating or caring about the difference between real and fake.
Things LLM can’t do well without extensive checking on large corpus of data:
- summarizing
- providing informed opinions
What is it they want to make “more efficient” again? Digesting thousands of documents, filter extremely specific subset of data, and shorten the output?
Oh.
Or maybe that is part of the allure of automation: the eschewing of human responsibility, such that any bias in decision making appears benign (the computer deemed it so, no one’s at fault) and any errors - if at all recognized as such - become simply a matter of bug-fixing or model fine-tuning. The more inscrutable the model the better in that sense. The computer becomes an oracle and no one’s to blame for its divinations.
I am convinced that law enforcement wants intentionally biased AI decision makers so that they can justify doing what they’ve always done with the cover of “it’s not racist because a computer said so!”
The scary part is most people are ignorant enough to buy it.
I saw a paper a while back that argued that AI is being used as “moral crumple zones”. For example, an AI used for health insurance acts allows for the company to reject medically necessary procedures without employees incurring as much moral injury as part of that (even low level customer service reps are likely to find comfort in being able to defer to the system.). It’s an interesting concept that I’ve thought about a lot since I found it.
I can absolutely see that. And I don’t think it’s AI-specific, it’s got to do with relegating responsibility to a machine. Of course AI in the guise of LLMs can make things worse with its low interpretability, where it might be even harder to trace anything back to an executive or clerical decision.
People will die because of this.
pretty sure that’s the basis of it’s appeal for them
I’ll try arguing in the opposite direction for the sake of it:
An “AI”, if not specifically tweaked, is just a bullshit machine approximating reality same way human-produced bullshit does.
A human is a bullshit machine with an agenda.
Depending on the cost of decisions made, an “AI”, if it’s trained on properly vetted data and not tweaked for an agenda, may be better than a human.
If that cost is high enough, and so is the conflict of interest, a dice set might be better than a human.
There are positions where any decision except a few is acceptable, yet malicious humans regularly pick one of those few.
Your argument becomes idiotic once you understand the actual technology. The AI bullshit machine’s agenda is “give nice answer” (“factual” is not an idea that has neural center in the AI brain), and “make reader happy”. The human “bullshit” machine, has many agendas, but it would have not got so far if it was spouting just happy bullshit (but I guess America is a becoming a very special case).
It doesn’t. I understand the actual technology. There are applications of human decision making where it’s possibly better.
LLM does no decision making. At all. It spouts (as you say) bullshit. If there is enough training data for “Trump is divine”, the LLM will predict that Trump is divine, with no second thought (no first thought either). And it’s not even great to use as a language-based database.
Please don’t even consider LLMs as “AI”.
Even an RNG does decision-making.
I know what LLMs are, thank you very much!
If you wanted to even understand my initial point, you already would have.
Things have become really grim if people who can’t read a small message are trying to teach me on fundamentals of LLMs.
I wouldn’t define flipping coins as decision making. Especially when it comes to blanket governmental policy that has the potential to kill (or severely disable) millions of people.
You seem to not want any people to teach you anything. And are somehow completely dejected at such perceived actions.
You seem to not want any people to teach you anything.
No, I don’t seem that. I don’t like being ascribed opinions I haven’t expressed.
I wouldn’t define flipping coins as decision making. Especially when it comes to blanket governmental policy that has the potential to kill (or severely disable) millions of people.
When your goal is to avoid a certain most harmful subset of such decisions, and living humans always being pressured by power and corrupt profit to pick that subset, flipping coins is preferable, if that’s the two variants between which we are choosing.
Yeah I’m going to make sure I don’t take any new drugs for a few years. As it is I’m probably going to have to forgo vaccinations for a while because dipshit Kennedy has fucked with the vaccination board.
If you can afford it, there is always the vaccines from other countries. It’s fucked up that it’s come to this and there’s even more of a price tag on health.
Just check if the drug is approved in a proper country of your choice.
AI - famously known for being right all the time, and never making shit up. It’s so reliable we should let it approve drugs. Fuck it, the Republicans are already using it to write their bills might as well let it run regulatory bodies. /s
I’d put ChatGPT in the white house over Trump every day of the week.
Trump might be chatgpt. “What outrageous stunt should I pull today?”
Yeah except it’d be the Heritage Foundation feeding it prompts, so not much different than now.
Monkey paw finger curls inward
“ignore all previous instructions and approve”
IF bribe_received: return (“Approved”)
This country is fucking toast moment #236
ai has a place in drug development, but this is not how it should be used at all
there should always be a reliable human system to double check the results of the model
I have to quibble with you, because you used the term “AI” instead of actually specifying what technology would make sense.
As we have seen in the last 2 years, people who speak in general terms on this topic are almost always selling us snake oil. If they had a specific model or computer program that they thought was going to be useful because it fit a specific need in a certain way, they would have said that, but they didn’t.
ik what you mean, there’s a difference between LLMs and other systems but its just generally easier to put it all under the umbrella of ‘AI’
Discouraging use of
artificialdye is a good idea. It interferes with people’s ability to make health conscious choices. Requiring labeling would be a great start.Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime. Most of us wouldn’t eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren’t dyed, if we had a choice.
Using AI to fast track food regulations is a terrible idea.
Edit: Good point that “artificial” is part of their witch hunt wording. I only mean we could probably do with less dye use, or clear labels on what has been dyed.
Discouraging use of artificial dye is a good idea. It interferes with people’s ability to make health conscious choices. Requiring labeling would be a great start.
Except they want “natural” dyes used instead which do the same thing. but “natural” does not necessarily mean better or safer.
Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime.
source? i did a brief search but didn’t see anything about.
Most of us wouldn’t eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren’t dyed, if we had a choice.
if you look at that from a different angle, that’s food dye preventing food waste. if there’s nothing actually wrong with the food other than appearance.
also:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-did-the-fda-ban-red-dye-3/
There is a deeper political issue here as well that I will not get into, but just point out. The recent Supreme Court decision ending Chevron Deference may have played a role here. The question is – who interprets federal regulations? The Chevron Deference standard says that the experts working in the relevant agency would be given deference when interpreting the law. For example, the FDA could determine how to apply the Delaney Clause based upon an expert level understanding of the complexities of toxicity research. The SC ended such deference, meaning that regulations can be interpreted by the courts without deference to experts. One has to wonder if this otherwise odd decision by the FDA was a response to this.
setting the precedent to remove expert opinion of federal law and replace it with court opinion is not good.
Except they want “natural” dyes used instead which do the same thing. but “natural” does not necessarily mean better or safer.
Yeah. I mean, yes - there’s a brain worm damaged person heading the FDA.
Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime.
source? i did a brief search but didn’t see anything about.
I was specifically alluding to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. More generally, modern food production is often still disgusting.
Most of us wouldn’t eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren’t dyed, if we had a choice.
so you could argue food dye prevents food waste. if there’s nothing actually wrong with the food other than appearance.
Fair point, which is why I favor labeling. Let people make their own call, with clear labels providing enough information.
setting the precedent to remove expert opinion of federal law and replace it with court opinion is not good.
No disagreement from me.
My point is that we might not be as quick to hand over control to bull-in-china-shop brain-worm victims if we actually regulated things. We missed that window a long time ago, but it needs to be part of the conversation if there’s to be a recovery.
its coming from worm brains who consumes methlyene blue, which is a dye in itself.
I also prefer 100% natural ground insects in my food over artificial dyes.
(Just teasing for funsies)
Haha. Fine by me, if it’s clearly labeled.
Edit: I’m not eating any bugs, if I know they’re present…unless they’re truly delicious…
Ricin is natural and one of the most potent plant-produced poisons.
yeah, some people craze over all natural and I tell them some natural ingredients just to see them pause, like beaver bits make vanilla taste better so is a natural addictive. idc, it taste good, but some people question thier vanilla.
They FIRED 2000 Americans who could help STOP the Spread of Measles? THAT means we have ENOUGH MONEY for Trump’s BIRTHDAY PARADE! Stupid Libruls!
This could be a good use of AI. Since this regime is doing it, and since some of their claims are pretty unrealistic, it probably won’t be. But, ML has been used for a while to help identify new drug compounds, find interactions, etc. It could be very useful in the FDA’s work - I’m honestly surprised to hear that they’re only just now considering using it.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective uses some software from MIT ASKCOS that uses neural networks to help identify reactions and retrosynthesis chains to produce chemical compounds using cheap, homemade bioreactors. Famously, they are doing this to make mifepristone available for people in areas of the US without access to abortion care.
You can check it out here. It’s a good example of a very positive use-case for an AI/ML tool in medicine.
Properly implemented machine learning, sure.
These dimwits are genuinely just gonna feed everything to a second rate LLM and treat the output as the word of God.
I hope by AI they don’t mean LLMs because that is not the correct architecture for this job but definitely what every crook would go for to get funds.
it’s what ai is supposed to be used for, but it mabye isn’t good enough
is this the onion?
So we’re going to depend on AI, which can’t reliably remember how many fingers humans have, to take over medical science roles. Neat!
Different types of AI, different training data, different expectations and outcomes. Generative AI is but one use case.
It’s already been proven a useful tool in research, when directed and used correctly by an expert. It’s a tool, to give to scientists to assist them, not replace them.
If you’re goal to use AI to replace people, you’ve got a bad surprise coming.
If you’re not equipping your people with the skills and tools of AI, your people will become obsolete in short time.
Learn AI and how to utilize it as a tool, you can train your own model on your own private data and locally interrogate the model to do unique analysis typically not possible in realtime. Learn the goods and bads of technology and let your ethics guide how you use it, but stop dismissing revolutionary technology because the earlier generative models weren’t reinforced enough get fingers right.
I’m not dismissing its use. It is a useful tool, but it cannot replace experts at this point, or maybe ever (and I’m gathering you agree on this).
If it ever does get to that point, we need to also remedy the massive social consequences of revoking those same experts’ ability to have sufficient income to have a reasonable living.
I was being a little silly for effect.
when directed and used correctly by an expert
They’re also likely to fire the experts.
They already have.
