Medical AI

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This talk examines the growing divide between conversational AI systems and task-specific medical AI, and why that distinction has become a critical clinical competency. As artificial intelligence moves from the margins of healthcare into everyday clinical decision making, many clinicians and administrators conflate chatbots with the specialized, validated systems built for diagnostic support, imaging analysis, and risk stratification. This talk traces the history of medical AI back to its origins in the nineteen fifties, through decades of expert level image recognition systems, to the current moment where fluent conversational tools dominate public perception. The core argument is that clear, confident language is not the same as sound clinical judgment, and that chatbots are designed to sound authoritative whether or not they are correct, while task-specific medical systems are built, trained, and evaluated against a fundamentally different standard.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for distinguishing these system types, understanding how each reaches its conclusions, and applying core safety principles so that AI outputs become prompts for further investigation rather than final answers accepted at face value. The presentation is designed for clinicians, health system leaders, and anyone responsible for evaluating or deploying AI tools in patient care settings.