Erin Jonaitis on Nostr: Teaching non-practitioners to understand what they're looking at is important, so ...

Teaching non-practitioners to understand what they're looking at is important, so thanks for making this a living course. My sense is that public understanding of what "AI" means is fairly weak. We're now seeing compliance folks pushing back on any use of our own data to train any AI model, which in the limit could result in absurdities like not being permitted to set internal cutpoints for normal vs abnormal on a blood test (which is necessary because not everything used in research is a clinically validated test that comes with package inserts, and because some assays have normal ranges which vary significantly by lab). I'm on board with a restriction on using generative AI specifically, but "no AI at all" pushes very far back into the past in a way I think laypeople don't really understand. People were doing AI work when I was in my PhD program 20 years ago! And it wasn't new then, either.