AI's Impact on Healthcare, Search, & Art

MUST KNOW #1 - Throw a Flag for Early Start on Medical Transcription?

Despite warnings from OpenAI against using their voice to text technology in high-stakes applications, over 30,000 medical professionals have employed OpenAI’s Whisper-based tools to transcribe patient visits. In order to maintain privacy, the original audio files are deleted. That’s already a red flag in any healthcare audit trail.?

On top of that, shocking percentages of inaccuracies in these AI-generated notes are raising alarms about potential risks to patient safety and medical record integrity. While fine-tuned for medical terminology, OpenAI has acknowledged the AI may still “confabulate” or make up information.?

In some of the data reviews from outside consultants, error rates in the AI transcripts ranged anywhere from 10 to 60% plus. As a statistical range, the width of that gap is astounding and I’m mystified that it’s not being talked about more vocally. Especially by the impacted patients and providers that were on the higher end of the error range.?

As Whisper and similar AI tools become more prevalent in healthcare, it’s vital to validate their accuracy, maintain human oversight, and ensure sensitive patient data is protected. The convenience of AI must be balanced with the utmost standards of safety and reliability.?

Building trust in these systems is vital and misses like this stand to set back thinking around possibilities in industries outside of healthcare.?

MUST KNOW #2 - ChatGPT Adds Web Search Capabilities

The ever popular ChatGPT has launched a web search feature to provide users with real-time information from the internet. The model automatically triggers a search when a question relates to current events, location-specific details, or niche information not covered in training data.

ChatGPT retrieves information from reliable online sources and puts it back into a familiar, conversational answer to the user. This ensures the information covered includes the most up-to-date facts and context.

Searches are conducted with privacy in mind. ChatGPT doesn’t track individuals or search history across sessions. Here’s a snapshot of what a search result looks like:

Look how clean that is. Eight results in total. The LLM’s presented “Trust Set”. It would almost look lonely if it wasn’t so white space friendly. And no paid ads. YET.?

If you’ve been involved in marketing over the past 20 years, you know how crowded, competitive, and expensive a search like this would be at Google or Bing. If you have a budget for search, you’re investing in keyword ads spending thousands to millions monthly in order to keep up.?

Hopefully you’re also spending on foundational, evergreen content that you own and is unique to your business. You’re using SEO tactics to ensure every page that can show up, is showing up at Google, Bing and anywhere else your customer might be.

Google was already saying at the beginning of this year that the future of search was in expertise, authority, and engagement. Are you showing your customers that you really are the best? Are you adding valuable insights and perspectives on your business and sector that makes you unique? And are people actually paying attention to what you’re doing.?

The ultimate takeaway for most businesses should have been, “Hot air is only going to be blowing for so much longer. There are no more quarters to insert.”

Instead, everyone got distracted by Generative AI and the large consulting houses were glad to soak up those contracts. So here we are looking at 2025 and consumer expectations are shifting faster than ever. Are you ready?

MUST KNOW #3 - Recraft's Reveal Shows GenAI Art's Rapid Evolution?

Recraft (this link gives me credits to my account for new users) is a new art generator making waves with its public beta release. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, it leapfrogged mainstream heavyweights like Midjourney, Ideogram, Stability.ai, and others at HuggingFace’s Image Generation Leaderboard.

When it first showed up, it was just labeled “red panda” and overnight jumped to #1 in terms of user rankings. The quality and variety of Recraft's outputs is what is blowing away users like me. I’m currently using the Free account, which gives you 50 images to generate a day.

Over the past year, services seem to be launching more and more daily free credits because of the anticipated burn rate from excited users. Everything in the space keeps demonstrating the breakneck pace of advances on all fronts.

What sets Recraft apart is its range of artistic styles that break the anime and sci-fi CGI stereotypes common to AI art. They give you simple choices to get started:

Recraft is able to render images in styles ranging from oil painting, clay, pixel art to comic book illustration, often with stunning quality and variety. Here’s an image I made the other day for a client mockup.

The rapid progress, from the first crude GAN-generated faces to today's AI creations that can pass as human-made, is both exciting and unsettling. As teams continue to master creative and imagination based tasks, I think these technologies will spur fascinating connections across art, design, entertainment and more.?

At the same time, it raises challenging questions deep in my sould about the nature of creativity and the role of human artists in an AI-powered world.

Recraft's successful beta is another example of AI's relentless march forward. I'll be watching closely to see what this and other AI models deliver next.

Have thoughts on anything I've covered this week? Let me know in the comments below. I look forward to hearing from you. Until next time.