Cited by 149Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and EducationEthics and Social Impacts of AIExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Medical Artificial Intelligence and Human Values

Open access
Yu, Kun-Hsing, Healey, Elizabeth, Leong, Tze-Yun, Kohane, Isaac S., Manrai, Arjun K.·2024·New England Journal of Medicine

Abstract

Recent progress in generative artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to large language models (LLMs) that can be prompted to craft persuasive essays, 1 pass professional competency exams, [2][3][4] and write patient-friendly empathetic messages.5 Amid growing recognition of the capabilities of LLMs, many have expressed concerns about their use in medicine and healthcare, citing known risks of confabulation, fragility, and factual inaccuracy.6 As these risks are measured and mitigated, what is coming into focus are unresolved questions about the human values that will remain embedded in AI, both in their creation and in their use, and how the "values of an LLM" may misalign with human values even if AI models no longer confabulate and have been scrubbed of obvious toxic output.Such "human values" pertain broadly to the principles, standards, and preferences that reflect human goals and guide human behaviors (Glossary).As we review here, LLMs and new foundation models, as technically impressive as they are, are only the latest incarnation of a long line of probabilistic models integrated into medical decision-making, all of which have required their creators and implementers to make value judgments.Many of the challenges we address here were evident to the pioneers of medical decision analysis of the 1950s 7 and to scholars in subsequent decades [8][9][10][11] who conducted careful and creative studies of both human and algorithmic decision-making to disentangle probability, the chance of an event occurring, from utilities, the quantified value judgments that are often only indirectly articulated in much of medical decision-making (Glossary).The nuanced understanding of individual values and risks is what makes the thoughtful clinician so indispensable.These considerations have renewed relevance with unprecedented and ubiquitously available AI models like LLMs.In this article, we first describe how value judgments enter predictive models, using familiar clinical settings and new AI language models.We then connect early work in reasoning about probabilities and utilities to the emerging issues of newer AI models, identifying unresolved challenges and future opportunities in designing high-performance and safe AI models.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1056/nejmra2214183

Cites

77 of 77 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • AI development is led by major technology companies whose goals may not always align with those of patients or healthcare systems.

    “Consequently, AI development is led by major technology companies whose goals may not always align with those of patients or healthcare systems [10, 11].”

    From Implementing Artificial Intelligence in Critical Care Medicine: a consensus of 22. (2025) · cites this paper as [10]

    The Values Embedded in Large Language Models section describes models produced by organizations including Google, and the Motivating Clinical Example asks whether model outputs reflect patients’ values or those of other parties. This supports the concern about potentially misaligned goals, but the paper does not establish that major technology companies lead AI development. The indexed passages provide no page numbers. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. Tversky A, Kahneman D. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science 1974;185(4157):1124-31. [PubMed: 17835457]
  2. Moor M, Banerjee O, Abad ZSH, et al. Foundation models for generalist medical artificial intelligence. Nature 2023;616(7956):259-65. [PubMed: 37045921]
  3. Stats, STAT! [Internet]. [cited 2024 Mar 25];Available from: https://evidence.nejm.org/browse/ evidence-media-type/stats-stat
  4. Yang J, Jin H, Tang R, Han X, Feng Q, Jiang H. Harnessing the power of llms in practice: A survey on chatgpt and beyond. arXiv preprint arXiv [Internet] 2023;Available from: https://arxiv.org/abs/ 2304.13712
  5. Garza AG, Wyrwich KW. Health utility measures and the standard gamble. Acad. Emerg. Med 2003;10(4):360-3. [PubMed: 12670850]
  6. Mate A, Madaan L, Taneja A, et al. Field Study in Deploying Restless Multi-Armed Bandits: Assisting Non-profits in Improving Maternal and Child Health. AAAI 2022;36(11):12017-25.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Yu, K.-H., Healey, E., Leong, T.-Y., Kohane, I. S., & Manrai, A. K.
Affiliations
Brigham and Women's Hospital (US)
Venue
New England Journal of Medicine
Published
2024-05-30
Volume
390
Issue
20
Pages
1895-1904
ISSN
  • 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
  • 1533-4406
OpenAlex
W4399120295
Cited by
149
References
70
Citations by year
2026: 47 · 2025: 85 · 2024: 17
FWCI
3.40
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • New England Journal of Medicine (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL174679)
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM142879)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Keywords
large language models, generative AI, human values, clinical decision-making, algorithmic decision-making, AI safety, foundation models, clinical decision support
MeSH terms
Clinical Decision-Making, Clinical Reasoning, Artificial Intelligence, Humans, Language, Risk, Social Values, Bias

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review