Okay so maybe read the article first. It, along with my other writings, are linked in the original post.
Second, no-one is saying that medical researchers should be banned from using AI. I fact I got called out for overstating this in my original post and changed it to acknowledge this an explicit positive potential. So this is just a straw man. If AI was used by responsible people for responsible things, I would be doing the same thing I’ve been doing the past decade-plus, i.e. looking at the field with curiosity. But we have long left that behind.
Nonetheless, the purported positive uses of AI in the sciences must be seen in the wider context of the hype machine that is selling AI to us all. It’s the hypists who are doing the damage by making ridiculous claims and overselling a technology with limited practical use, while systematically hiding the extremely large range of dangers and harms that it is actually causing. They use sleight of hand to make us look only at the potential benefits that they say it might bring in the future.
The poster child for medical applications of AI is Alphafold, which was touted as “changing everything”. It’s been around for six years now, and while medical scientists use it for investigating protein structures, when it comes to actual realized applications, there seems to be little if anything. Wikipedia discusses potential practical benefits and notes that, despite its limitations, the model had predicted some COVID protein structures. However:
The team acknowledged that although these protein structures might not be the subject of ongoing therapeutical research efforts, they will add to the community’s understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
I.e. the AI contribution, such as it is, has had no practical effect. I mean, I’m no expert, and that’s just Wikipedia, but I’ve looked around for other things and so far as I can tell, after six years Alphafold has produced bupkiss of use. Meanwhile, all of the actual medical and health progress we have made is due to human intelligence.