> Amazing how you can just deflect any criticism of LLMs here by going “but humans suck too!” And the misanthropic HN userbase eats it up every time.

I think it's rather people trying to keep grounded and suggest that it's not just the hallucination machine that's bad, but also that many doctors in real life also suck - in part because of the domain being complex, but also due to a plethora of human reasons, such as not listening to your patients properly or disregarding their experiences and being dismissive (seems to happen to women more for some reason), or sometimes just being overworked.

> You simply would not be able to replace a real doctor with an LLM and get desirable results.

I don't think people should be replaced with LLMs, but we should benchmark the relative performance of various approaches:

  A) the performance of doctors alone, no LLMs
  B) the performance of LLMs alone, no human in the loop
  C) the performance of doctors, using LLMs

Problem is that historical cases where humans resolved the issue and not the ones where the patient died (or suffered in general as a consequence of the wrong calls being made) would be pre-selecting for the stuff that humans might be good at, and sometimes wouldn't even properly be known due to some of those being straight up malpractice on the behalf of humans, whereas benchmarking just LLMs against stuff like that wouldn't give enough visibility in the failings of humans either.

Ideally you'd assess the weaknesses and utility of both at a meaningfully large scale, in search of blind spots and systemic issues, the problem being that benchmarking that in a vacuum without involving real cases might prove to be difficult and doing that on real cases would be unethical and a non-starter. And you'd also get issues with finding the truly shitty doctors to include in the sample set, sometimes even ones with good intentions but really overworked (other times because their results would suggest they shouldn't be practicing healthcare), otherwise you're skewing towards only the competent ones which is a misrepresentation of reality.

Reminds me of an article that got linked on HN a while back: https://restofworld.org/2025/ai-chatbot-china-sick/

The fact that someone would say stuff like "Doctors are more like machines." implies failure before we even get to basic medical competency. People willingly misdirect themselves and risk getting horrible advice because humans will not give better advice and the sycophantic machine is just nicer.

ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies – study