X owner and White House cabinet nominee Elon Musk asked users to upload MRIs, CT scans and other medical information for his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok to review and some fell for it, Fortune reports.
Musk pitched the idea on X in late October 2024.
“Try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI or other medical images to Grok for analysis. This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good,” he wrote. “Let us know where Grok gets it right or needs work.”
Some people who volunteered images celebrated Grok being “spot on” with blood test results and breast cancer detection but others waved red flags against the platform.
Josh Sharp, who goes by @showinvestment on social media, pointed out how a broken clavicle was looked at as a dislocated shoulder.
Radiologist Docteur TJ, provided an in depth analysis on an MRI image that he partially labeled as “too generic.”
Another example is the bot mistaking a mammogram of a benign breast cyst for an image of testicles.
Grok was launched in May 2024 after, through Musk’s tech startup, xAI, raised $6 billion in an investment funding round. Grok is not the first of its kind: Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT also allows people to submit medical images.
While some have praise the potential technology advancement, medical privacy experts are not in that camp.
“This is very personal information, and you don’t exactly know what Grok is going to do with it,” Vanderbilt University’s professor of biomedical informatics, Dr. Bradley Malin said, according to the New York Times.
“Posting personal information to Grok is more like, ‘Wheee! Let’s throw this data out there, and hope the company is going to do what I want them to do.”The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects medical information when shared with doctors or on a patient portal, as federal guidelines protect it from being shared without consent. But protections do not reach social media sites—only for doctors’ offices, hospitals, health insurers, and some companies they work with.
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