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"Take a picture of your partner's Tintin and we'll help you tell if you're at risk of contracting STDs from the appearance of Tintin!"
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The United States recently released a "Ding Ding Recognition" APP equipped with AI technology, but I didn't expect it to cause controversy as soon as it was put on the shelves.
According to the introduction, the APP only needs the user to take a photo of Ding Ding and click to upload, and the AI can automatically identify whether there are visual signs of sexually transmitted diseases and feedback the results within seconds.
After AI learns and absorbs various Ding Ding photos from around the world, the success rate of judgment will further increase, so after the release, the APP operating company hopes that more users will take active action to take more and upload more Ding Ding photos.
Good guys, let's play "Volkswagen Ding Review" here...
The company that released the app said that their products can be used for free, and before the official release, the AI algorithm was trained on thousands of pictures of Dingding, and it is already a veteran driver.
The company representative also said that the images were collected from the public and examined by doctors on a case-by-case basis. When a user takes a photo of their partner's dingding and clicks upload, the built-in AI scans the photo and compares it against a database of images for any signs of a potential sexually transmitted disease.
If the AI senses that something is wrong with the picture of Ding Ding in front of it, it will immediately remind the user to postpone having sex and suggest actions such as using protective measures or going to the doctor.
Of course, AI will only prompt risks, and does not yet have the ability to determine the specific situation of suspected diseased Dingding. If there are no signs of illness in the photo, the app will display "Everything is normal", prompting the user to continue the intimate act.
As soon as the APP was released, it sparked controversy.
Some sexual health experts mentioned that this method of identifying Ding Ding by visual alone is not reliable: "Even if you ask a doctor with 30 years of experience to see a doctor in a well-lit clinic, there is no guarantee that a diagnosis will be made by vision alone, let alone through the AI algorithm of the app." ”
In this regard, the R&D company of APP also responded: under the influence of different lighting and skin color and other conditions, the judgment accuracy of APP ranges from 65%~96%.
Users can think of the app as the first line of defense before engaging in intimate acts, but can't expect it to be the perfect solution, they say: "Our AI is a master at detecting appearances, but it's also important to note that some sex-related infections have a long cycle, and symptoms may not appear until weeks after exposure." ”
(Yudara Kularathne, the company's founder, came up with this idea after a friend experienced a scare about sexually transmitted infections.)
The bigger concern is that the app can identify Ding Ding by taking photos and uploading this method, which cannot guarantee data and privacy-related issues. For example, it is impossible to determine whether the user has the consent of the owner of Ding Ding before uploading the photo, and whether the owner of Ding Ding is over 18.
(Co-founder Mei-Ling Lu said work is being made to address issues regarding user privacy)
Netizens said that they are not optimistic about this kind of APP: it cannot ensure the accuracy rate, and there is a risk of leaking privacy, no matter how you think about it, it is not very reliable...
"A gimmick that will only bring all kinds of trouble, and it is better to count on this accuracy than to count on fortune telling, at least fortune telling is also an interaction between people. ”
"It may seem like this AI can only detect lesions that are visible to the naked eye, but in reality most sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis, most of the time have no obvious signs.
You don't know who the person in front of you had sex with yesterday or who their partner had sex with before, so be sure to be protective because a person may already be a carrier before any signs appear!"
"We've gotten to the point where life is dominated by too much technology. ”
Although AI is not optimistic in the field of Ding Ding identification at present, after the rapid development in the past two years, its application in other medical fields is being deeply explored, and more and more research projects using AI for disease detection have sprung up.
For example, a study released by the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in December last year said that AI can analyze X-rays and diagnose medical problems like doctors.
The project's AI algorithm was trained on chest X-rays from more than 1.5 million patients to analyze 37 possible conditions. Thirty-five of them are as accurate as doctors' analyses, and in some cases even more accurate than doctors.
Of course, the researchers mentioned that the purpose of similar AI projects is not to replace doctors, but to reduce doctors' workload and diagnostic delays, and provide radiologists with a "second opinion".
In the United States, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, have developed an AI model that can predict the onset of Alzheimer's disease as early as seven years before clinical symptoms appear.
Traditional methods for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease are usually applied only after symptoms have appeared, but often, by the time patients begin to develop symptoms, the optimal time for treatment has already been missed. If Alzheimer's disease can be diagnosed in advance, symptomatic treatment can be faster and more effective.
The principle of the new study is that the researchers used AI to analyze the medical center's huge database of 5 million patients, find the complex nonlinear relationships that often occur in medical data, and screen out many factors that have certain correlations with Alzheimer's disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and vitamin D.
"This is the first step in using AI on routine clinical data, not only to identify risks early, but also to understand the biology behind them," the study concluded in the journal Nature Aging. It is expected to change the early diagnosis and detection of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. ”
(Schematic diagram)
If AI diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease can be popularized on a large scale in the future, it will undoubtedly become a gospel for the prevention and treatment of potential risk groups and confirmed people around the world.
(Schematic diagram)
At the same time, there are AI projects that target the human voice.
Google's AI tool, trained on human audio clips, is expected to assess a person's lung function and determine whether they have lung disease by discerning coughing and breathing sounds.
The project leader mentioned that through an automated process, they extracted more than 300 million short sound clips of coughing, breathing, throat clearing and other human voices from publicly available online videos to detect characteristics such as COVID, tuberculosis and whether a person smokes.
(Schematic diagram)
"The science of acoustics has been around for decades, and what is different today is that with AI and machine learning, we have the ability to collect and analyze large amounts of data at the same time. ”
The study has not yet been reviewed by the industry, but Google has previously made it possible to take photos of skin conditions to help determine what abnormalities may be present in the skin. Industry insiders are more optimistic that the new "AI cough judgment" will also come true sooner or later.
(Schematic diagram)
Technological development has brought more possibilities to medicine, and it is possible that in the next technological explosion, the application of AI in the medical field will usher in a greater leap. We can also look forward to what kind of surprises AI will bring to the medical progress of mankind in the future.