AI has an antiquated view on gender and medicine.

What that says about us.

Recently, I published an essay about a collaborative moment I had with a colleague that potentially saved a patient’s life. In the piece, I described how the nurse’s subtle word choices led me to escalate our response to a particular case.

Usually, I add a header graphic to each Inside Medicine post. If there’s data to show, I might choose a relevant graph as the header. Other times I use Getty Images. Once in a while, I use ChatGPT's DALL-E function, which quickly creates custom-made images using AI.

My interaction with ChatGPT (version 4o) while making the image for the weekend post was so bizarre that I am sharing it with you now. Remember, AI is some distillation of what a computer thinks humans believe about the world. In my view, then, what follows reflects humanity more than AI.

Suffice it to say, we still have quite a ways to go on views of gender equality in medicine.

Read on, and share in my horror….