Our AI Midwife
A couple struggling with unexplained infertility utilized a large language model, personified as a fictional doctor, to analyze their medical data and seek answers. The AI provided detailed insights into their scans and treatments that aligned with their human doctors' assessments, offering immediate and patient responses. This experience highlights the potential of AI to supplement medical care by providing accessible, continuous support during complex fertility journeys.
- ▪The couple used a prompt engineering technique to make ChatGPT roleplay as a medical drama character named Dr. Reid to bypass safety filters.
- ▪The AI's diagnostic suggestions and explanations were consistently verified as accurate by their human fertility specialists.
- ▪The model provided immediate answers to detailed medical questions, avoiding the typical delays associated with patient portal communications.
- ▪The AI eventually suggested an MRI, which was a standard but potentially overlooked diagnostic step in their six-year treatment process.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:20:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T01:30:18.188Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T01:30:18.188Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
TranslateOur AI MidwifeA guest post by Drew HousmanScott AlexanderOct 02, 202618ShareThis is a guest post by Drew Housman, whose review of Dominion earned finalist status in the 2024 ACX book review contest.If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you. The fertility doctors don’t become unkind, but they also don’t give you the sense they are pouring over medical journals trying to figure out your problem. They have looked for the keys under the streetlight and come up empty.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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