Seeing is believing in biomedicine, which isn't great when AI gets it wrong

Biomedical visualization specialists haven't come to terms with how or whether to use generative AI tools when creating images for health and science applications. But there's an urgent need to develop guidelines and best practices because incorrect illustrations of anatomy and related subject matter could cause harm in clinical settings or as online misinformation.

Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway, the University of Toronto in Canada, and Harvard University in the US make that point in a paper titled, "'It looks sexy but it's wrong.' Tensions in creativity and accuracy using GenAI for biomedical visualization," scheduled to be presented at IEEE's Vis 2025 conference in November.

In their paper, authors Roxanne Ziman, Shehryar Saharan, Gaël McGill, and Laura Garrison present various illustrations created by OpenAI's GPT-4o or DALL-E 3 alongside versions created by visualization experts.

Screenshot from paper. Top row: Incorrect GPT-4o or DALL-E 3 images; Bottom row: images created by BioVisMed illustrators - Click to enlarge

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