Radiology professor tries AI writing tool to create material for website
Wondering where all the junk on the internet comes from? Apparently it is written by computers using artificial intelligence! Well, at least that’s what the folks over at jasper.ai would like for you to believe. According to this company, they are using AI to help you write materials for your blog or website to drive traffic your direction. At the very least, they promise they will make it easier for you.
People have been promising that computers were going to take over radiology for at least the past decade, and as far as I can tell there has been very little progress. However, most of this is about image interpretation and this is the first time I’ve seen a product claim that it can do writing for you.
As the owner of learnneuroradiology.com and producer of a lot of educational content, I was wondering what this would mean for someone who creates highly specialized content like myself. I figured this might be halfway decent for a generic interest blog or website, but I didn’t think it would be very good for subspecialized material like radiology and specifically neuroradiology.
Introduction to the product
I started by taking a look at their introduction video, where they make a lot of claims about how much faster they can create content and show you a brief example. Like all promotional material, it definitely makes big promises, including that they have analyzed 10% of the internet. There are testimonials and everything. I feel like this tells us a lot about the internet that most of it is being written by a bot.
It took a little bit to set up a trial. I had to enter the name of my website, some billing information (including a credit card number), and what kind of content I was creating. The full product starts at $49 / month but there is a free trial for 5 days. That’s what I’m taking. Once I finished, I was able to see the full dashboard.
Generic article about Brain MRI
I started with a generic article about Brain MRI to see how it would do with some more general content. After entering some basic information, I got started pretty quickly. It required me to start writing the article before it created some content, but surprisingly it generated some half-way relevant, if overly generic material. With a little bit of guidance and a few clicks, I had created a decent general interest article. My initial impressions were that it was doing ok. It did a pretty decent job on a general article. I give it a “B to B+”.
More specific article about glioblastoma
Now it’s time to give it something a little harder. Glioblastoma. I expected it to perform worse, but it had some surprisingly decent comments about the imaging features and could even differentiate between imaging modalities, like computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging. It could fill in rudimentary although sometimes wrong information about the differential diagnosis and prognosis. I’m not going to lie, this is exceeding my expectations.
Technical article about white matter abnormalities
Finally, I tried an article a little bit more technical about white matter abnormalities. Of all the articles, this one did the worst, but it was still fairly relevant. It was able to come up with some differential diagnosis for white matter lesions and relevant diseases. It did provide a little bit more irrelevant or wrong content than the other articles.
It did make me a little sad that we don’t have more report generation tools that are radiology specific. I feel like a similar tool trained on radiology reports with radiology diagnoses could actually go a long way towards helping me generate differential diagnoses on challenging cases. I’m looking forward to having more tools like this in the future but I don’t feel like this is quite ready for primetime right now, even for writing a website.
Tune in next time for additional interesting content and radiology teaching material! Thanks for checking out the site!
Summary
So what are my final recommendations? I wouldn’t use it for my site, but it is capable of generating some half-way useful content. I expected to be able to make fun of it more, but it exceeded my applications. What is my overall impression: I wouldn’t throw it in the trash. I can imagine it is pretty useful for a generic interest site, but for more specialized applications it does get a little unraveled. It becomes a little repetitive, and I’m worried that it is actually just regurgitating content from other sites. There is a “plagiarism checker” but I was unable to use it because it required an additional fee that I didn’t want to pay.
“What is my overall impression: I wouldn’t throw it in the trash.”
It did make me a little sad that we don’t have more report generation tools that are radiology specific. I feel like a similar tool trained on radiology reports with radiology diagnoses could actually go a long way towards helping me generate differential diagnoses on challenging cases. I’m looking forward to having more tools like this in the future but I don’t feel like this is quite ready for primetime right now, even for writing a website.
Tune in next time for additional interesting content and radiology teaching material! Thanks for checking out the site!