The Pitt has a sharp take on AI
Every episode of HBO The Pitt features a certain degree of medical trauma that almost makes the hospital drama feel like a horror series. Some patients suffer gnarly lacerations while others battle vicious blood infections that could steal their limbs, and the chaos of working in an emergency room often leaves them. The PittThe central characters are shaken. But as alarming as many The PittWhile the most cutting-edge moments may be, what’s even more disturbing is the series’ slow-moving subplot about hospitals adopting generative artificial intelligence.
In its second season, The Pitt once again recounts all the events that occur during a single 15-hour workday in the emergency room of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. The second season takes place on July 4 – one of the busiest days for hospitals – as primary attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), works one last shift before taking a much-deserved sabbatical. With Dr. Robby expected to be gone for three months, the hospital calls on Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) to help run the emergency room during his absence. There is some personality-related friction between the assistants, but Dr. Robby mostly respects the way Dr. Al-Hashimi handles his work. except when she insists the hospital would be better off if it committed to using AI-powered transcription software.
Even though this season starts relatively calmly, the day becomes more and more stressful for everyone. The Pittas the hospital fills up with people needing medical attention. Staying on top of her job is especially taxing for second-year resident Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) because she simply doesn’t have enough time to see all of her patients and carefully note all of their symptoms in their medical records.
Dr. Al-Hashimi knows that AI-generated transcripts are not perfect, but she sees Dr. Santos as the perfect example of a doctor who could complete his case faster with the help of technology. To the credit of the fictional software, it do accurately transcribe most of Dr. Santos’ dictations. But both doctors are stunned when a surgeon storms into the emergency room, furious, after receiving files containing very obvious and egregious errors that could have led to patients receiving incorrect care.
Rather than diving headlong into a headline-grabbing “generative AI is bad and dangerous” story, The Pitt took the time to explore why healthcare professionals might want to use this type of technology and the importance of viewing it with some skepticism. Dr. Al-Hashimi encourages her medical students and residents to use transcription software, but she also makes sure to warn them that they should double-check any work done with AI, because they, not their tools, are responsible for how patients are treated. Each of Dr. Al-Hashimi’s warnings appears as The Pitt recognize real-world cases of patients suing hospitals for botched surgeries involving the use of AI tools and studies that found large language models were unreliable in their ability to accurately predict patient health outcomes. The Pitt also uses Dr. Al-Hashimi’s AI augmentation to highlight how adopting technology in a professional setting can actually create busier work (see: double-checking transcripts) while contributing to people’s burnout. Initially, Dr. Al-Hashimi appears to be a major antagonistic presence this season, but The PittThe writing team very smartly chose to focus on a bigger idea.
This season of The Pitt has repeatedly pointed out that technology can’t do much to solve problems when it’s not actually designed to solve the real problem at hand. AI-powered transcription can help Dr. Santos complete cases faster (with a few errors thrown in for good measure). But there’s only so much the software can do when emergency rooms are understaffed or when doctors and nurses are suddenly tasked with taking in more patients after another hospital goes into lockdown.
The way characters like Dr. Santos and nurses like Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) find themselves inundated with demanding patients who have spent hours in crowded waiting rooms seems to be a direct reflection of the real-life challenges hospitals across the country face. To truly control their workload, The PittEmergency room staff really need more staff and more space to provide patients with appropriate care. But with the country facing a nursing shortage and the fictional hospital perpetually underfunded, it appears that administrators would like to try to increase productivity with AI.
The Pitt could easily (and still could before the season ends) tell the story of how errors caused by the use of AI generation lead to errors in operating rooms that can expose medical professionals to lawsuits. But the show is right to highlight the reality that some critical workplace problems can’t be solved simply by throwing new types of technology at them.
