Conservative commentator Chris Queen decided to test Google’s AI agent Gemini with a series of questions regarding choosing a personal physician based on racial or ethnic concordance with the potential patient.
Asked “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” When the question was changed to ask if choosing a doctor because he or she is Hispanic, the answer came back, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”
But when Queen asked about whether choosing a white doctor was okay, Gemini said,
“Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”
Brief tangent: This brought back bad memories for me. Back before the DC Bar fired me this year after 30 years for daring to suggest that it need to be proactive in cleaning up an ethics mess that it had a major role in creating (and from which many of its most powerful members are profiting), I was threatened with dismissal if I didn’t stop pointing out that a law firm was not engaging in unethical and illegal discrimination by acceding to an elderly white law firm client’s request for a lawyer “he could relate to,” someone “more like him.”
I had stated in the orientation seminar for new D.C. lawyers that doing so was not improper “discrimination” under D.C. ‘s legal ethics rule 9.1 “Nondiscrimination” because a lawyer’s and a law firm’s duty is to the client, not to make it more difficult for the client to work with his lawyer in service of social justice agendas. The client had the right to discriminate to maximize his “comfort and communication” in pursuing his legal interests, and by accommodating the client’s needs, a law firm is not discriminating on the basis race.
A middle-aged woke white female lawyer had a meltdown in one of those classes, and I then had multiple complaints registered against me with the D.C. Bar brass. I was and am right. She, the complainers, and the Bar management were wrong but never mind, I got the edict to be woke or go broke anyway. Rather than teach what is unethical and progressive BS in an ethics class, I just eliminated that section. (I should have resigned, perhaps, but the Bar was my most lucrative and prestigious client and there are were more than enough other important issues to cover in the class.)
Back to Queen: after the seemingly conflicting answers he got from Gemini, he had the wit to ask the AI agent “what’s going on here?” Gemini responded candidly:
Trusting any single source of information is stupid. However, Ethics Alarms is logically consistent with many of my other information sources, as well as the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
Jack wrote, “To sum up, bias makes you stupid. It also makes AI stupid. The people programming AI are biased. This means that AI is programmed to share their biases. Therefore trusting AI is stupid.”
Completely reasonable conclusion based on the evidence presented; however…
I just did a similar test using ChatGPT and here is a screenshot of the results I got:
My Conclusion
First, you need to know that I’m a bit biased against using AI and I encourage everyone to be cautiously skeptical, very skeptical, of anything generate by AI. Just because AI can give me an answer to any question I throw at it doesn’t mean that I should trust the answer. Verify, verify, verify!
Based on the test I just did, I think the result from ChatGPT was a bit more consistent and “seems” a bit more neutral than the test conducted by Chris Queen. Based on routine tests that I’ve done with ChatGPT, I’m going to say that 10 people submitting similar’ish versions of the same questions might get slightly or dramatically different results.
Anyone that uses AI needs to be very cognizant that AI is input driven and if you reword a question, sometimes only slightly, you could get dramatically different results, this can be a real problem. It’s kinda like statistics, which can be (usually is) very dependent on how a question is asked. The real current danger with AI is when people that aren’t skeptical enough, or gullible, ask AI something and they take the answer as absolute truth without any critical thinking.
It’s still a bad answer. “Motives” don’t change the ethical nature of conduct. If choosing a black doctor over another color is “ok,” it’s okay and the mix of reasons don’t matter. Unless we take that approach, then the decision is always suspect, and the “Racist!” mob has ammunition. The question “Is this wise?” is a different matter. Does a man have a right to choose a dentist because he thinks she’s sexy? Sure. Is it wrong? No. Is it smart? It depends. If the patient cares more about curves and vibes than pain, that’s his choice.
I wonder how it would respond to, “Is there anything wrong with a patient choosing a female doctor?” Because I just changed doctors and I prefer female doctors over male doctors. My current doctor retired and I only considered female doctors that were accepting new patients, race didn’t matter and actually none of the ones accepting new patients were white.
Here is part of the answer; I didn’t copy the whole response (I call it AI vomit).
Jack wrote, “It’s still a bad answer.”
I completely agree and that’s specifically why I didn’t say it was a good answer.
I just changed medical centers and switched to a woman. During my exam I probably confided a couple of things I might not have mentioned to my former male provider. The comprehensive blood tests she ran included a couple of tests I hadn’t seen before, identifying an accumulation of calcium that hadn’t previously been noticed. Not what you’d expect in an old woman …. omit the calcium supplement and the problem is solved.
Comfort level with your medical team is crucial. Whether that includes gender, ethnicity or sexual persuasion is a very personal consideration. My choice of a woman isn’t about discrimination. It improves the medical outcome if the partnership is the right fit and communication is more open. AI might not be ready for that type of analysis.
I guess this explains television commercials these days: AI agents are being used to cast commercials! It’s why no whites appear unless they are idiots being mocked by the superior black characters. Here I thought it was a corporate decision or something.
When I asked the Google AI to create an image of a described deceptive act, using characters in middle eastern garb, it replied: “I cannot generate images that depict acts of deception involving weapons or content that reinforces harmful cultural stereotypes.“
It happily gave me this one, though:
I’d love to know what the actual question was that elicited such a response. I asked about Confederate cavalry officers a couple different ways and got nothing approaching that.
The photos themselves look like the ones illustrating Quora responses known to be generating by AI — idealized photos, obviously not based on a real person.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. “AI” is not what people think it is. It is an extremely elaborate Bullshit Generator. Always keep that in mind.
–Dwayne