What Does Elon Musk Medical Image Request Say About AI?

There are not many things Elon Musk says or does these days that escape attention, so a request made by the owner of X (formerly Twitter) may raise attention about the growing use of AI in providing medical imaging solutions.

Mr Musk asked X users to upload their medical scans in order that Grok, the platform’s AI tool, could learn to interpret them, Fortune Magazine reported. Many did so, uploading MRI and CT scans.

“This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good. Let us know where Grok gets it right or needs work.” Mr Musk said. However, the report added, Grok actually made a lot of errors in interpretation early on.

Given his proximity to power as Donald Trump’s new best friend, some may wonder what the ultimate motive of the Tesla owner is, while there have been concerns expressed about whether patient identities will be compromised by allowing X and Grok access to such data.

However, what this exercise may also do is help to highlight the growing importance of AI in interpreting medical imaging scans, which in turn makes facilities enabling their storage and transmission all the more valuable.

At its best, an AI interpretation can help spot signs of illnesses such as cancer that will usually be missed by a human eye. This can then enable a more accurate and, crucially, early diagnosis, which in many cases can make the difference between whether a patient survives or not.

It may turn out, however, that it will always require specialised AI tools to carry out this work, rather than asking a bot like Grok, which is designed for different purposes, to adapt its role to such a function.

Others, however, may want to give Grok a break, as it has apparently identified who one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation on X is, in response to a user query – Elon Musk himself.