Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage.
Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend).
Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.
It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that.
"This is awesome. Great use of AI to realize an idea. Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI.
It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that."
Let's take that bit by bit then if you find it hard to correlate.
> This is awesome.
Agreed, it is a very neat demonstration of what you can do with domain knowledge married to powerful technology.
> Great use of AI to realize an idea.
This idea, while a good one, is not at all novel and does not require vibe coding or LLMs in any way, but it does rely on a lot of progress in image classification in the last decade or so if you want to take it to the next level. Just training people on a limited set of images is not going to do much of anything other than to inject noise into the system.
> Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI.
Well.. yes and no. It is a hopeful thing but it doesn't really help when releasing it bypasses the whole review system that we have in place for classifying medical devices. And make no mistake: this is a medical diagnostic device and it will be used by people as such even if it wasn't intended as such. There is a fair chance that the program - vibe coded, remember? - has not been reviewed and tested to the degree that a medical device normally would be and that there has been no extensive testing in the field to determine what the effect on patient outcomes of such an education program is. This is a difficult and tricky topic which ultimately boils down to a long - and possibly expensive - path on the road to being able to release such a thing responsibly.
> It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades
As I wrote, I'm familiar with quite a few startups in this domain. Education and image classification + medical domain knowledge is - and was - investable and has been for a long time. But it is not a simple proposition.
> and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that.
Hardly anybody that I'm aware of - besides the Trump administration - currently opposes fighting cancer, there are veritable armies of scientists in academia and outside of it doing just that. This particular kind of cancer is low hanging fruit because (1) it is externally visible and (2) there is a fair amount of training data available already. But even with those advantages the hard problems, statistics, and ultimately the net balance in patient outcomes if you start using the tool at scale are where the harsh reality sets in: solving this problem for the 80% of easy to classify cases is easy by definition. The remaining 20% are hard, even for experts, more so for a piece of software or a person trained by a piece of software. Even a percentage point or two shift in the confusion matrix can turn a potentially useful tool into a useless one or vice versa.
That's the problem that people are trying to solve, not the image classification basics and/or patient education, no matter how useful these are when used in conjunction with proper medical processes.
But props to the author for building it and releasing it, I'm pretty curious about what the long term effect of this is, I will definitely be following the effort.
Better like that?
I also hope it will completely kill US pharmacy conglomerate.
AI was trained on public domain knowledge. All things we get from it should be free and available everywhere.
I can only hope.
I believe this is a simple educational quiz using a pre-selected set of images from cited medical publications to help people distinguish between certainly benign and potentially cancerous skin anomalies… Is that incorrect?
That's a valid hope, but not a very realistic one just yet. The error rates are just too high. Medicine is messy and complex. Yes, doctors get it wrong every now and then. But AI gets it wrong far more frequently, still. It can be used as a tool in the arsenal of the medical professional, but we are very far away from self-service diagnosis for complex stuff.
> I also hope it will completely kill US pharmacy conglomerate.
That is mostly based on molecules and patents, not so much on diagnostics, that's a different group of companies.
> AI was trained on public domain knowledge. All things we get from it should be free and available everywhere.
Not necessarily, but for the cases where it is I agree that the models should be free and open.
> I can only hope.
Yes. I've seen some very noble efforts strand on lack of capital and every time that happens I realize that not everything is as simple as I would like it to be. I've just financed a - small - factory for something that I consider both useful and urgent, but my means are limited and it was clear that I had no profit motive (which actually means my money went a lot further than if I had had a profit motive).
Once you get into medical education or diagnostics the amounts usually run into the millions if you want to really move the needle. No single individual is going to put that out there on their own dime unless they were very wealthy to begin with. I've invested in a couple of companies like that. They all failed, predictably, because raising follow on investments for such stuff is very hard, even if you can get it to work in principle.
The best example of stuff like that that did work is how the artificial pancreas movement is pushed forward hard by people hacking sensors and insulin pumps. They have forced industry to wake up and smell the coffee: if they weren't going to be the ones to offer it then someone else inevitably would. Even so it is a hard problem to solve properly. But it is getting there:
https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/wearenotwaiting-the-p...
Such pamphlets typically contain a lot more guidance on what the context is within which they are provided. They don't come across as a 'quiz' even if they use the same images and they do not try to give the impression of expertise gathered. They tend to be created by communications experts who realize full well what the result of getting it wrong can be. Compared to 'research on the internet' there is a lot of guidance in place to ensure that the results will be a net positive.
https://www.kanker.nl/sites/default/files/library_files/563/...
Is a nice example of such a pamphlet. You were complaining about the number of words I used. Check the number of words there compared to the number of words in the linked website.
There is no score, there is no 'swiping' and there is tons of context and raising of awareness, none of which is done by this app. I'm not saying such an app isn't useful, but I am saying that such an app without a lot of context is potentially not useful and may even be a negative.