ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: IBM Watson recommended ‘unsafe’ cancer treatments, according to internal documents.

According to the internal slide deck, the problem stems from this Watson product being trained on a small number of “synthetic,” hypothetical cancer patients, rather than real-world cases. The accuracy of any AI is dependent on being trained on a large dataset—the larger and more accurate the dataset, the better. Watson’s recommendations were based on expert advice from specialists on each cancer type but not masses of actual cancer treatment cases. The result has been recommendations that are not on part with national treatment guidelines, according to Stat News.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem, as Watson gets more and more real-world data to chew on.