Are Level Ex Games Being Used to Train AI?

The answer is NO!

As doctors play our games, where we challenge them with difficult procedural, diagnostic, and treatment cases in their field, we are often asked:

“Wait a minute — are my in-game interactions and decisions being used to train medical AI?”

Or, in other words: “Is my playing this game being used to train my eventual AI replacement?”

We were taken aback by the question at first, but as we learned about the plethora of applications out there that are trying to mine physician interactions to train AI systems, we started to realize where this concern was coming from.

Our upcoming dermatology game isn’t trying to create the derminator. Quite the opposite.

First off, let me just say that’s just not what we do. That’s not our mission. At Level Ex, we use game technology and design to improve physicians’ skills. We care about training *real* neural networks (the kinds inside the skulls of medical professionals) — not training artificial ones.

We are a team of over 120 people, including dozens of software engineers, biomedical engineers, and medical professionals. We do not have a single AI or machine learning engineer on staff. We simply aren’t building or training AI. Our games are not designed for that.

For example, in our upcoming dermatology game, we have all sorts of visual, diagnostic, and treatment challenges — but in all cases there’s a known right answer. In other words, these challenges are not useful for training AI, but they’re great for refreshing and expanding doctors’ knowledge.

Sure, we’d have a lot more venture capital dollars thrown at us if we pretended that we were an “AI Company”, but we just aren’t. We’re a game company.

When I explain this to people, it sometimes leads to the next question:

“Well, OK… but if you’re not training AI, how does Level Ex make money from these apps?”

ANSWER: Advertising and sponsorship.

Just like leading medical journals and medical conferences, our games are supported by 1) industry sponsors that use our platform to help doctors better understand when and how to use their products and 2) grantors, such as medical societies that use our platform to disseminate the latest best practices. Sponsored content in our games is always obvious, so that you know what content is from your peers and what comes from the industry. It’s this sponsorship (not an AI analysis of your in-game behavior) that enables us to deliver tools to physicians for free worldwide.

Bottom line, we believe that apps should help doctors — not replace them.