2y ago

Using AI, researchers identify a new class of antibiotic candidates that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium

phys.org

39 comments

Great; so this is all public domain knowledge since it was created with AI according to current law, right?
- Personally I think all medicine should be public domain
  
  Everything should.
  Medicine. Internet. Waste disposal.
- Yeah, so the actual law is that if you didn't do any work and just gave ChatGPT or Midjourney a prompt and it shat out a picture and then brag to the copyright office in your application that you didn't do diddly squat, the work effectively had no human authors. If, instead, you build a new machine learning model, tune it for your specific problem, analyze the results, and furthermore, break new ground understanding how it solved your problem, and then you write the paper, in fact, you have tons of ownership over the work.
  The fact people can't tell the difference between the two and are actually upvoting you kind of says a lot about how little most people understand this stuff.
  
  I'm just downvoting you for being a smarmy prick. Not because your comment is inaccurate.
- I think those rulings have only applied to creative works. We'll see.
  
  This 100% is classified as a creative work. That's why drugs are able to be patented in the first place.
- Depends, what was the training set / knowledge base?
A key innovation of the new study is that the researchers were also able to figure out what kinds of information the deep-learning model was using to make its antibiotic potency predictions. This knowledge could help researchers to design additional drugs that might work even better than the ones identified by the model.
That is awesome. I wonder if the techniques that they have used to expose the machine learning “black box” process can be applied to other models - from my understanding of it, that would be pretty big news in and of itself.
- Hope so, that's the big leap forward with machine learning IMO.
  
  So what, we are learning what caused AI to come to a conclusion?
With the defeat of the super bugs, I for one welcome the super super bugs.
- Exterminate all rational thought. That's the conclusion I've come to.
Great. Now lock it away and require CDC approval for each dose. We may just get out of this alive.
Just kidding, nobody gets out of life alive.
- Decade tops.
I guess all the people solely cheering for this aren't aware of the damage we've been doing to ourselves with antibiotics:
While antibiotic resistance gets all the attention, the damage being done to our host-native microbiomes is arguably as big a threat as climate change, as the damage compounds over generations, and once it's gone you can't get it back. (Apr 2019).
Resistance may already be a solved problem: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#fmt-to-counter-antibiotic-resistance
- Interesting. Who is the seemingly random person posting on a forum about human biomes? Do you have a peer reviewed paper on it?
  
  It says who they are in their signature. And a plethora of peer-reviewed papers are cited.
- Would you prefer to live in a world without antibiotics?
  
  No but people should really stop abusing OTC antibiotics like Neosporin. You don't have to put it on every wound.
  
  Only a Sith deals in absolutes. https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#antibiotics-overuse
  IMO, the lack of ability for nuance is a sign of low intelligence.
  Relevant: Antibiotics that kill gut bacteria also stop growth of new brain cells: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519130105.htm
Great!

39 comments