At 2 a.m. last Tuesday, a worried parent typed their child’s symptoms into ChatGPT. The bot confidently named a rare genetic disorder. The pediatrician the next morning spotted something entirely different—early vitiligo. One was a medical emergency; the other a manageable skin condition. The difference? Context, intuition, and two decades of clinical experience no algorithm can yet replicate.

Welcome to our semi-traditional Sunday read, the weekly detour where we leave the paved road of dermatology and explore the terra incognita of AI. Coffee in hand? Good. Let’s dive in.

A CEO’s Straight-Up Take on AI’s Promise—and Its Face-Plants

I’m Yan Valle, engineer turned Vitiligo Research Foundation frontman and an honorary professor of medical sciences. Two summers ago my team and I rolled out vitiligo.ai, a chat-based “virtual professor” that has devoured more dermatology papers than most residency programs can assign. Unlike full-vision platforms such as Skinopathy, our bot can’t judge your selfies; it lives on words, context and evidence. 

That limitation is a feature as much as a flaw—it keeps us honest about what AI can do in 2025 and what still belongs in the exam room.

A quick stopover at Toronto Tech Week

Around the WVD-2025 AI-in-Derm summit during Toronto Tech Week, hype flowed freely: instant diagnoses, algorithmic empathy, the whole futuristic package.

Yet, I’d heard the soundtrack before. Google Health launched twice, folded twice; Microsoft HealthVault limped along for a dozen years before the plug was pulled; IBM Watson for Oncology overpromised and slid quietly offstage; even our own Vitiligo CloudBank sputtered after a decade and one spectacular server crash.

All had brilliant engineers, big budgets, and keynote-ready interfaces—yet each belly-flopped. Healthcare runs under heavier gravity than consumer tech. Start-ups design for a sleek, API-friendly universe that doesn’t exist. The real world is sixty-five-year-old clinicians wrestling legacy software and forty-plus patients who prize “reliable” over “revolutionary.”

Which brings us to ChatGPT. It isn’t a moon-shot gadget; it’s a Swiss-Army prompt that slips into today’s creaky workflows—provided we know where it shines and where it’s likely to slice a finger.

Why talk about chatbots at all?

Because people are using them—often late at night, often anxious, sometimes desperate. I’ve seen heart-warming stories: an overlooked diagnosis finally spotted after someone pasted their symptoms into ChatGPT. I’ve also seen the reverse—patients convinced they have every autoimmune condition under the sun after nudging the bot into apocalypse mode. The truth lives somewhere in between.

Here’s what I’ve learned from thousands of patient chats, endless code sprints, and a front-row seat to AI’s growth spurt.

Where conversational AI genuinely helps

1. Rapid recall: when you already know the answer

Sounds backwards, but stick with me. Say I already know how to fix vitamin D deficiency but need the dosing table refreshed before a consult. Because I grasp the basics, I can spot nonsense if it hallucinates. Think of AI here as the world’s fastest memory jogger.

2. Pattern recognition: When data is rich and tidy

Give vitiligo.ai a narrative that includes when the first spot appeared, how fast it’s growing, family thyroid quirks, any odd rashes in childhood. The bot connects dots quickly, sometimes fast enough to nudge a clinician toward a test that might otherwise have waited months. It’s not magic; it’s well-organized pattern matching.

3. Visit Prep Done Right: When patients need rehearsal time

A chatbot can coach you to turn “weird blotch on my knee” into “depigmented macule, two centimetres, appeared three months ago after a bike fall.” That five-minute rehearsal routinely saves five precious minutes in a 15-minute consult.

Where the Wheels Come Off

1. The context gap

Mom brings in her eight-year-old. “White spot after a scraped knee—probably nothing?” ChatGPT, blind to nuance, might echo that optimism. My trained eye screams early vitiligo because of the halo nevi around a birthmark on his chest, and suddenly we’re talking Wood’s lamp screening. AI lacks the instinct born of thousands of real-world cases.

2. Confident fabrications

Leave out a key detail—say, the nightly doom-scrolling that keeps you awake—and suddenly an ordinary tension headache is “post-concussion syndrome.” The algorithm isn’t malicious; it’s just blind to the part of the story you never told.

3. Confident hallucinations

Ask an impossible question—“Cure my unicorn rash, stat!”—and the bot may serve a polished, utterly fabricated protocol, citations and all. I’ve seen clinicians blink before spotting the fiction. Patients rarely have that radar.

How we keep vitiligo.ai on the rails

We specialise like fanatics—one disease, deep domain. We keep humans firmly in the loop: the bot suggests, doctors decide. And we iterate relentlessly, feeding real-world feedback straight back into the model. When we miss, we fix—fast.

Practical rules of engagement

If you're: 

• Patient, use AI to practise describing symptoms and decode jargon. Don’t push it to confirm your 3 a.m. WebMD nightmares.
• Clinician, treat AI as a hyperactive intern—great recall, zero judgment. Double-check everything and welcome patients who’ve done their AI homework.
• Healthcare leader, insist on rigorous validation, clear accountability and continuous audits. Shiny-toy syndrome helps no one.

Looking ahead: the human-AI tag-team

The future isn’t man or machine—it’s man with machine. AI crunches terabytes; humans supply context, empathy and the gut-feel born of countless clinic days. Think chess grandmasters using computer prep: silicon sets the stage; the person still plays the endgame.

At VRF we’re betting on that partnership. Let AI track lesion spread, flag thyroid red flags and pull the latest JAMA study seconds after publication on PubMed. Let dermatologists decide if a teen needs topical steroids, phototherapy or simply someone to say, “You’re still beautiful.”

Until the next time,

— Yan Valle

CEO, Vitiligo Research Foundation | Author, A No-Nonsense Guide to Vitiligo

Keep digging: 

• What Happens When Mad Men Meet Breaking Bad Inside a Chatbot?
• Do AI Models Really Understand the World of Vitiligo?
• From “Just a Chatbot” to Cognitive Contender: AI’s Surprising New Abilities