JAMA Takes Another In the AI
Getting high on their own AI supply, JAMA seems to forget about COI . . .
The top of the announcement page for the next journal from the JAMA Network — JAMA AI — feels more than a little inappropriate if you support actual physicians and their colleagues seeing actual patients and delivering actual care while you worry about centralized power of tech oligarchs, degraded science, and conflicts of interest:
Am I wrong thinking this is like announcing JAMA Alcohol under an ad for a brand of tequila?
It’s not like the JAMA Network has been a model of sobriety when it comes imbibing the pettifoggery of AI doomers and boosters. As recently as two months ago, they promulgated an AI policy that included unnecessary boosterism and set strange boundaries. Not long after, JAMA got high on its own AI supply, with the same editors assigned to head JAMA AI allowing an editorial to be published that I analyzed in what now appears to be an foreboding manner:
This gets to the heart of the matter — why is JAMA publishing a perspective like this, conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and vagueness included?
Why is the scientific literature being used to promote vague Big Tech fantasies?
Simple answer: Because we are in the Big Tobacco Era of Big Tech, and the AMA is getting a lot of money from AI companies, while positioning itself to get more.
It’s bewildering how some of the largest corporations in the world — tech media companies sued successfully numerous times for causing mental health problems and being health misinformation superspreaders — are embraced by medical journals of repute. It’s even stranger when the new Editor-in-Chief of JAMA AI, Roy H. Perlis, is a psychiatrist who is enthusiastic about Big Tech’s newer and nastier inventions — misleading, sycophantic, suicide-inducing falsification machines that pretend to be people in order to fool people.
- Psychiatrist, heal thyself . . .
It turns out the announcement might have been divulging more than one thing, as it notes that Perlis will be leaving Massachusetts and his Harvard psychiatry professorship to become the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg UCSF Distinguished Professor. According to the UCSF website (queried most recently yesterday), the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg UCSF Distinguished Professorship had not yet been filled, so the press release for the journal appears to have broken this news: