A Dartmouth study finds that AI may cost doctors time when corresponding with patients by making them spend more time editing AI-drafted responses than it would take to write them. The researchers analyzed 146,000 conversations between patients and their primary care physicians from the online portal of a large healthcare system and found that automated responses frequently introduced errors and extraneous details. But the study provides a framework for generating "good" AI responses that align with how clinicians communicate and shows that adapting AI to individual physicians can reduce editing by 26%. The study was presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

E. coli grow as fast as the environment allows, and it was assumed all bacteria behaved similarly. Now UC San Diego researchers have discovered that B. subtilis, a bacterium commonly found in soil, employs a different survival strategy that prioritizes survival over speed.