Medical AI tools risk producing doctors who never learned to think for themselves

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AI’s danger isn’t just in experts losing the ability to reason. It’s that trainees may never learn how to do so in the first place

In healthcare, there’s growing concern over doctors becoming less clinically adept as they increasingly rely on AI tools. But what about the trainees – medical students, residents and fellows – who are using these tools before they’ve built their own clinical judgment? The idea of deskilling implies that someone possessed an ability and then lost it. Here, the danger is not just deskilling but never-skilling. Although a doctor who has forgotten how to reason is recoverable, one who never learned how may not be.

OpenEvidence, essentially an AI chatbot for clinicians, has given this concern its most concrete form. About two-thirds of US doctors actively use OpenEvidence, asking about puzzling symptoms, drug interactions, and clinical guidelines, getting responses within seconds, anchored in the latest research. Trainees, unsurprisingly, have also begun to use this AI tool in many of the same ways – but at a far more formative stage.

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