I’ve been critical of OpenAI lately, but for the past three weeks my family has been dealing with a health issue with my dad, and a ChatGPT shared project with live document syncing has been essential to organizing and understanding everything happening. Me, my four siblings, my mom, and my dad have faced an onslaught of information from various doctors and nurses, which we’ve captured in hundreds of text messages and documents and scans and you name it.
ChatGPT has helped us collect this information in a single place, make sense of it, and interrogate it to make the most informed decisions possible.
Also, credit where due: Claude played an important role as well, by ingesting iMessages and synthesizing summarizes from them to upload to ChatGPT, as well as by extracting text from a bunch of HEIC document scans.
I think those of us, like me, excited at AI’s potential get frustrated when we can see issues so clearly, like ChatGPT’s bad design skills, and Claude’s increasing instability and confusing usage consumption.
But at times like this I’m reminded of how incredible this technology already is, letting me and my family make sense and act on hundreds of pieces of information, empowering us in the face of a disjointed and fragmented healthcare system.