To make healthcare fairer for Black communities, AI needs to include Black voices and experiences

Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a big part of our lives, including in healthcare. Some people are worried AI might get too smart, take away jobs, or hurt people’s privacy. Dr. Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, wants to ease those fears. She hopes people will see how AI can help improve healthcare, especially for communities that don’t always get the care they need. Dr. Gopalakrishnan believes that AI and generative AI can make healthcare fairer — but only if people from underserved communities help shape it. “It’s not enough to teach people how to use AI,” she says. “We need to teach them how to question it and teach it to reflect our values, not just our data.” AI refers to computer systems that try to make decisions like humans. In healthcare, AI uses information to predict things like someone’s risk of getting cancer or to suggest treatments. DR. VANATHI GOPALAKRISHNAN AI also finds patterns in health data, which is called predictive modeling (PM). PM helps guess how cancer might grow or whether a patient might need to return to the hospital. Generative AI is different. It learns from big amounts of...