Lemmy, I really would like to hear your opinions on this. I am bipolar. after almost a decade of being misdiagnosed and on medication that made my manic symptoms worse, I found stable employment with good insurance and have been able to find a good psychiatrist. I’ve been consistently medicated for the past 3 years, and this is the most stable I have been in my entire life.
The office has rolled out the use of an app called MYIO app. My knee jerk reaction was to not be happy about the app, but I managed my emotions, took a breath and vowed to give it a chance. After being sent the link to validate my account, the app would force restart my phone at the last step of activation. (I have my phone locked down pretty tight, and lots of google shit, and data sharing is disabled, so I’m thinking that might be the cause. My phone is also like 4-5 years old, so that could also be the cause.)
Luckily I was able to complete the steps on PC and activate that way. Once I was in the account there were standard forms to sign, like the HIPAA release. There was also a form there requesting I consent to the use of AI. Hell to the NO. That’s a no for me dawg.jpg.
I’m really emotional and not thinking rationally. I am hoping for the opinions of cooler heads.
If my doctor refuses to let me be a patient if I don’t consent to AI, what should I do? What would you do? Agree even though this is a major line in the sand for me, or consent to keep a provider I have a rapport with, who knows me well enough to know when my meds need adjusting?
EDIT: This is the text of the AI agreement. As part of their ongoing commitment to provide the best possible service, your provider has opted to use an artificial intelligence note-taking tool that assists in generating clinical documentation based on your sessions. This allows for more time and focus to be spent on our interactions instead of taking time to jot down notes or trying to remember all the important details. A temporary recording and transcript or summary of the conversation may be created and used to generate the clinical note for that session. Your provider then reviews the content of that note to ensure its accuracy and completeness. After the note has been created, the recording and transcript are automatically deleted.
This artificial intelligence tool prioritizes the privacy and confidentiality of your personal health information. Your session information is strictly used for the purpose of your ongoing medical care. Your information is subject to strict data privacy regulations and is always secured and encrypted. Stringent business associate agreements ensure data privacy and HIPAA compliance.
Edit 2: I just wanted to say that I appreciate everyone here that commented. For the most part everyone brought up valid points, and helped me see things I had not considered. I emailed my doctor and let them know I did not want to agree to the use of AI. I let them know that I was cool with transcription software being used as long as it was installed locally on their machines, but I did not want a third party online app having access to recorded sessions for the purposes of transcription. They didn’t take issue with it.
Thank you everyone!
Sounds reasonable, until the transcripts end up totally incorrect because the AI misinterpreted something or hallucinated.
As I said, this is something I do all the time myself. Even with just my piddling little graphics card it works fine, the technology is quite good these days. I’m sure a professional setup being used by a doctor would be a much higher standard than that.
I get the impression no level of quality and no kind of human involvement with the results will likely satisfy you, though. Which means your negative view of AI is not particularly useful here.
It is useful because it’s a protection against AI messing with our futures.
To illustrate the point re: transcriptions:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40326654/
The Unexpected Harms of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Reflections on Four Real-World Cases
Kerstin Denecke et al. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2025.
That article is from May 2025, almost a full year ago. In AI terms that’s the stone age.
One of the major problems of getting information about AI inside an anti-AI bubble is that nobody here is actually using it, so they don’t know what its actual quality and capabilities are like now. As I said, I actually set up a system like this for myself on my own personal computer and I keep it updated as new models come out, so I’ve seen what the state of the art (or near-state-of-the-art at any rate) is actually like.
Nothing is perfect, of course. But perfection is not the standard this system is to be compared against. The alternative is the doctor’s handwritten notes and personal memories. Those are almost certainly not as good.