An AI chatbot helped a couple conceive after six years of unexplained infertility
Our AI Midwife
After six years of failed IVF transfers and a diagnosis of unexplained infertility, Drew Housman and his wife turned to GPT-4 for medical guidance. By prompting the model to role-play a TV doctor named Dr. Reid, they got detailed answers and a suggestion to get an MRI—a test their doctors had never ordered. The scan revealed a 6cm fibroid, which was removed; soon after, they conceived naturally. Their son is named Reed.
There is a real chance that I wouldn’t have my son if it were not for AI. Who knows how many other happy babies are being ushered into the world by the weirdest midwife of all time.
- lordnacho
AI's biggest strength IMO is as a checklist guy.
Whatever it is being asked, it is great at throwing out new suggestions. This MRI idea sounds like another one of them.
It works well because humans are crap at checklists. For more or less anything you can think of, you'll come up with maybe 4 items, and the AI will add a few more. They may not be relevant, but the AI is very thorough.
- Tade0
> Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned!
I've noticed this happens a lot with characters that don't have any long lines and/or have limited vocabulary.
Furby trails off pretty quickly, Abathur from StarCraft 2 (great for shortening code comments BTW) starts talking like a typical LLM after a few sentences.
- thih9
> the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?”
To be fair, this level of reasoning is on par with free tier chatgpt.
To me this story is less about a triumph of AI and more about a failure of the healthcare system.
- Marha01
Gemini 3 correctly diagnosed the cause of my skin issues that a real dermatologist failed to diagnose, despite multiple visits. I followed its advice and now the issues are completely gone.
- keeda
A few comments here making categorical assertions about AI being worse than human doctors, or no proof of it does any better. There are literally studies out there. I've read only their synopses by people on social media (including comments here on HN!) but they exist and we should be basing our discourse in that evidence.
To summarize my understanding: just like all things AI, the current frontier is quite "jagged". But there is broadly accepted evidence that AI does do better than human doctors, and even human doctors with AI, in several key aspects (like diagnostic reasoning!) while it sucks in others (pharmacology!)
And just like all things AI, as TFA suggests, the real advantage might simply come down to it being widely available, massively knowledgeable, relentless, and infinitely patient with us.