High On Their Own AI Supply

The major medical journal most obviously catering to the attention economy is JAMA — from embracing OA, to publishing bad, headline-grabbing articles, to emphasizing clicks over quality, attention is an apparent obsession for their editors and publishers.

To add to the evidence, an attention-seeking editorial — basically, an ad in editorial clothing — was published in last week’s JAMA.

It framed itself with a question: “Will Autonomous AI Exceed AI-Aided Physicians as the Best Medical Care?”

• Talk about piling in the clickbait . . .

To skeptical minds like those you’d expect to exist within an editorial team, the assumptions and presumptions of this headline are manifold. What is “AI”? It is neither artificial nor intelligent, but rather a stack of technologies smooshed together to create a simulacrum of human interaction that has been fooling people for 50 years.

So, then what is “autonomous AI”? Will such a thing ever exist? Not using current language-based technologies, that’s for sure. What are “AI-aided physicians”? Many physicians seem to find AI superfluous, annoying, or untrustworthy. What about “AI-impeded physicians”? Or “AI-exploited physicians”?

What is “the best medical care”? A vaccinated public? A safe food supply? Doctors when you need them? Healthcare as a right? Does AI really matter to these bigger issues?

The headline does what marketing does — grabs your attention and bounds reality to begin pushing you down a marketing funnel.

When the authors have commercial interests in the potential result of you entering this marketing funnel, you might be forgiven for wondering what such a puff piece is doing in a medical journal of stature.

Two of the authors of the JAMA editorial are a writing team producing articles and books at a feverish pace — Ezekiel Emanuel and Abe Baker-Butler. Emanuel is a distinguished Venture Partner at Oak HC/FT, a growth equity firm specializing in healthcare and financial technology, where online sources indicate he “contributes significantly to the strategic direction of Oak HC/FT’s healthcare portfolio.”

Baker-Butler is a student who works for Emanuel in some very specific ways, according to his LinkedIn profile:

Write and edit op-eds on pressing public health issues; conduct and lead peer-reviewed scientific research on AI in healthcare; lead TA for How Washington Really Works public policy course; research, writing assistance, and publicity for Dr. Emanuel’s books; create talks for Dr. Emanuel

In other words, he’s a copywriter.

The scope of his purported research involves AI in healthcare, yet Baker-Butler has a BA in Global Affairs and is currently pursuing a Master of Public Administration. Why he feels qualified to “conduct and lead peer-reviewed scientific research on AI in healthcare” is beyond me. Emanuel — whose brothers Rahm and Ari are also well-known in politics and media — has no credentials in computer science. His main involvement seems to be as an investor.

The other two authors have even more blatant financial stakes in moving AI forward in healthcare. Forbes quickly noted that two of the authors — Neal and Vinod Khosla — are father-son billionaire AI investors. Neal is CEO of Curai Health, a company seeking to deliver remote AI-driven primary care (probably not coincidentally, Emanuel also has a role with Village MD, a primary care services firm).

Neal’s father, Vinod, is a VC billionaire worth an estimated $13.5 billion. Vinod was one of the first venture capitalists to invest in OpenAI, and he recently led an investor group that bought the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6 billion.

It’s important to note that the piece is a Perspective (and an “Editor’s Pick”). While it is an opinion piece, Forbes describes it as “new research,” which it is not. Perhaps their error is forgivable as the press release for the editorial on EurekAlert! describes it as a peer-reviewed study.

• The press release was accompanied by a promotional post on the Khohsla Ventures website.

After the opinion piece was published, Emanuel appeared on Yahoo! Finance, claiming that “trained AI will become [a] pivotal part of healthcare,” answering the rhetorical question posed in the editorial he co-wrote while showing him to be more of a carnival barker than an academic at this point.

He also posted about it on LinkedIn, making more definitive claims about his opinion piece: