Listening to my niece and nephew talk about the role that artificial intelligence (AI) is playing in their college academic experiences, I started thinking about AI’s impact on my profession, including what possible future human counselors will have in an age of machine learning.
Long before AI became part of our vernacular, technology had already eaten into the role of registered dietitians. Why bother seeing a dietitian when we have search engines, some would argue, and to an extent, these folks have a point. Some patients are only interested in information that is readily available online. Sure, online information can be of questionable quality, but we dietitians are wrong sometimes too, so accuracy is not guaranteed either way.
One of the issues with relying on online health information is applicability. At some point, I read a study that looked at people who self-diagnosed using WebMD and then got a formal diagnosis from a doctor, and the discrepancy between the two was quite high. So, sure, we can hop onto the internet and readily find the medical nutrition therapy protocol for treating various conditions, but what if the condition we believe ourselves to have is more nuanced than we realize or just plain incorrect? AI, of course, is more advanced than a simple search engine, and from my layman’s perspective, it seems to be continuously improving at a rapid rate. The interactive nature of AI has the potential to reduce self-diagnosis errors.
If all patients wanted was information, the future of nutrition counseling would look quite grim, but many people are looking for more than just knowledge and data; they want a human connection. They want to talk with someone who can relate to their own challenges – not because that someone is a something that has absorbed enough data about said challenges to have assembled appropriate responses and follow-up questions – but because that someone has lived experience and has felt scared, nervous, sad, excited, or however they are feeling in the midst of whatever situation has inspired them to find a dietitian. That human dietitian has genuine empathy.
An AI entity can spit out the right words and tone, can mimic empathy, but it remains – as the name suggests – artificial, and no matter how the technology evolves, this basic fact will never change.