Item — HN Reader

I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."

The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.

It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.

And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."

2 comments

>The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.

yes, that's the power of reputation. if a company with a proven track record of selling effective diagnostic tools decided to stake their reputation on a new system that sounds a bit like something from an ai-generated fairy tale, people might be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt.

when a company best known for selling actual ai-generated fairytales announces a medical diagnostic tool that sounds like an ai-generated fairytale, i think it's reasonable to treat that with some skepticism.

> yes, that's the power of reputation.

No, it's not just about reputation, at least for me it's about the fact that there is a relatively strict, FDA-approval process for actual medical devices. Midjourney's announcement was the equivalent of a marketing page for some supplement that claims it will make be sleep great while growing my penis (the page even basically even marketed it as a "wellness" product), not actual scientific evidence that the device would, or could, work as advertised.

Even damn X-Rays cost more than $100.

Something like this will never cost patients $100. Even if the actual cost to a provider was $5, patients would be billed $500 after insurance…

Two years ago I paid $60, CASH, no co-pay, no insurance, for X-rays of my hips. They were all digital and I got the interpretation (which was included) before I had finished driving the hours' drive home.