Abstract:This article analyzes the applications, advantages, limitations, ethical considerations, future prospects, and practical applications of the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and medicine. ChatGPT is an advanced language model that uses deep learning technology to generate human-like responses to natural language input. It is part of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model family developed by OpenAI and is currently one of the largest publicly available language models. ChatGPT can capture the nuances and complexities of human language, enabling it to generate appropriate and contextually relevant responses across a wide range of prompts. The potential applications of ChatGPT in the medical field range from identifying potential research topics to assisting professionals in clinical and laboratory diagnoses. Additionally, it can help medical students, doctors, nurses, and all members of the healthcare field stay updated on developments in their respective areas. Developing virtual assistants to help patients manage their health is another significant application of ChatGPT in medicine. Despite the potential applications of ChatGPT and other AI tools in medical writing, there are also ethical and legal issues, including potential violations of copyright law, complexities of medical law, and the need for transparency in AI-generated content. In summary, ChatGPT has various potential applications in healthcare and medicine. However, these applications come with limitations and ethical considerations, which will be presented in detail, along with a discussion of the future prospects in the medical and healthcare fields.
1. Introduction
ChatGPT is an advanced language model that generates human-like responses to natural language input using deep learning technology. It is a member of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model family developed by OpenAI and is currently the largest publicly available language model. By utilizing a vast amount of textual data, ChatGPT can capture the nuances and complexities of human language, allowing it to generate appropriate and contextually relevant responses across a wide range of prompts. While AI has been used in various fields like customer support and data management for a long time, its implementation in healthcare and medical research is relatively limited. Leveraging AI in healthcare systems is crucial as it can improve precision and accuracy while reducing the time required across various aspects of the system. The long-term benefits of incorporating AI into various aspects of healthcare can enhance efficiency and accuracy in the field. The potential applications of ChatGPT in medicine range from identifying potential research topics to assisting professionals in clinical and laboratory diagnoses. However, these applications come with limitations and ethical considerations, such as credibility and plagiarism, which will be discussed in detail later. Additionally, recent discussions regarding the authorship of research papers involving ChatGPT have emerged, which involve various standards and considerations that this article will explore. To date, only a few studies have documented the use of ChatGPT in healthcare and medicine in various aspects. This article provides an analysis and introduction to the advantages, limitations, ethical considerations, future prospects, and practical applications of ChatGPT and AI in healthcare and medicine.
2. Advantages and Applications
ChatGPT has numerous applications that can be utilized. Several articles have reported the use of ChatGPT in writing scientific literature, with one study indicating that ChatGPT can produce formal research articles. The authors found that the vocabulary was appropriate, seemed to have a traditional tone, and was pleasant to read. ChatGPT has the potential to be used as a search engine, responding directly to queries instead of directing users to websites where they must obtain answers themselves—this makes writing research papers easier and reduces the time authors spend searching for articles and applying various selection criteria to choose the most suitable articles for their research, allowing them to allocate that time to actual research work and methodology. It can also serve as an intermediary in creative meetings, assisting in topic selection and providing a starting point for research projects (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Overview of Applications, Advantages, Limitations, and Ethical Considerations.
Moreover, the articles generated by ChatGPT appear to be able to bypass traditional plagiarism detection methods. In one study, the chatbot was assigned to use a set of articles published in renowned journals such as JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and Nature Medicine to generate 50 medical research abstracts. Subsequently, these generated articles were reviewed by plagiarism detection software, AI output detectors, and a group of medical researchers tasked with identifying any artificially generated abstracts. The study found that the abstracts generated by ChatGPT passed the plagiarism detection software smoothly: the median originality score was 100%, indicating no plagiarism was detected, while the AI output checker only identified 66% of the generated abstracts. Additionally, it can reduce the time, energy, and resources spent on experiments that have a higher probability of yielding useless results by analyzing a vast amount of available literature beyond the expertise of any individual. It possesses a human-like ‘brain’ and successfully recalls previous interactions and prior user comments—a quality that previous AI language models often lacked.
Developing virtual assistants to help patients manage their health is another significant application of ChatGPT in medicine. It can be used to generate automatic summaries of patient interactions and medical histories, making the medical record process smoother for doctors and nurses. By dictating their notes, healthcare professionals can utilize ChatGPT to automatically summarize key details such as symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, as well as extract relevant information from patient records, such as lab results or imaging reports. It can also assist in clinical trial recruitment by analyzing large amounts of patient data to identify individuals who meet trial eligibility criteria. Furthermore, ChatGPT can help patients manage their medications by providing reminders, dosage instructions, and information on potential side effects, drug interactions, and other important considerations.
According to a recent article on the benefits of AI for self-management of sickle cell disease, ChatGPT can serve as a reliable conversational agent to collect information from patients with multiple conditions. It can also help medical students, doctors, nurses, and all members of the healthcare community stay informed about updates and new developments in their respective fields, and can serve as a tool for assessing clinical skills, thereby playing a critical role in medical education. Chatbots like ChatGPT can be powerful tools for improving health literacy, especially among students and young people.
ChatGPT may also be used for diagnosis. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in AI-based chatbot symptom checker (CSC) applications that provide potential diagnoses through human-like interactions and support users in self-triaging based on AI methods. Furthermore, ChatGPT can be used for clinical decision support and patient monitoring, suggesting consultations with healthcare professionals based on warning signals and symptoms.
3. Limitations
Despite the potential applications of ChatGPT and other AI tools in medical writing, there are also ethical and legal issues. These issues include potential violations of copyright law, complexities of medical law, and the inaccuracy or bias of generated content. Therefore, it is essential to acknowledge and address the limitations and issues associated with using AI for medical writing. According to two papers published in radiology journals, the accuracy of text generated by AI models heavily relies on the quality and nature of the training data used, and in some cases, the outputs of these models may be incorrect, leading to potential legal issues such as litigation.
Inaccuracies, biases, and transparency are additional issues that need to be addressed when using AI-generated text. The unethical use of AI technology may extend to the fabrication of images, constituting a form of scientific misconduct. Furthermore, the data fed to it is only updated until 2021. Additionally, many other limitations hinder its usefulness for research purposes, such as a tendency to provide inaccurate responses and repeat phrases from previous interactions. Moreover, it may be overly sensitive to variations in question phrasing and struggle to clarify ambiguous prompts. Chatbots may have difficulty recognizing important information and distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources, similar to biases faced by humans. This may limit their usefulness in research, as they may merely replicate work that has already been done without adding human-like scientific insights. Consequently, some scientists oppose the use of chatbots for research.
Text generated by ChatGPT can be identified through fictitious citations and irrelevant references, which helps identify plagiarism and other issues. However, concerns remain about students and scientists potentially using ChatGPT to deceive others or present its generated text as their own. It should be emphasized that current language models like ChatGPT cannot fully take over the role of human writers, as they lack a comparable level of understanding and expertise in the medical field. Therefore, those who use language models must acknowledge these limitations and take steps to ensure the accuracy and reliability of written materials.
4. Ethical Considerations
ChatGPT adheres to the EU’s AI ethical guidelines, emphasizing the importance of human oversight, technological robustness and safety, privacy and data governance, transparency, diversity and non-discrimination, social and environmental well-being, and accountability in the development and deployment of AI systems. These guidelines highlight the importance of empowering humans, ensuring safety and accuracy, respecting privacy, preventing unfair biases, promoting sustainability, and providing accountability mechanisms and remedies for negative outcomes (“Ethical Guidelines for Trustworthy AI | Shaping Europe’s Digital Future”, 2019). Most articles in scientific literature seem to focus solely on the ethical issues related to the use of ChatGPT in medical literature, as its other applications in medicine have not yet been widely utilized. The incorporation of AI into literature raises questions about authorship and accountability for the generated content. Although the articles created by ChatGPT exhibit less plagiarism, they are not entirely free of it and require human editing. Recommendations and personal comments based on works done by ChatGPT may also raise questions about their legitimacy. When AI-generated language is used for commercial purposes, it is crucial to ensure that it does not violate any potential copyrights. According to publishers and preprint servers contacted by the Nature news team, ChatGPT does not meet the standards for research authorship, as it cannot assume responsibility for the authenticity of the content and scientific research.
ChatGPT may serve a social purpose of eliminating language barriers, thereby allowing more individuals to produce high-quality medical literature. However, like other technologies, high-income countries and privileged scholars may ultimately find ways to leverage large language models (LLMs) to advance their research while exacerbating disparities. Therefore, discussions must include individuals from underrepresented groups in research as well as those affected by the research work to leverage their personal experiences as valuable resources. The definition of authorship must be examined and clarified.
As algorithms like ChatGPT become more sophisticated and efficient in the coming years, utilizing an increasing amount of data from the internet and elsewhere for updates, the potential for misuse and manipulation is significant. One study noted that some users attempted to rephrase queries and asked the model how to steal without imposing ethical constraints; the model chose to cooperate and provided extensive information on stealing strategies. Therefore, it is important for individuals to use it as an auxiliary resource rather than relying on it entirely, while validating the content it generates with ethical considerations in mind.
5. Future Prospects
In the future, ChatGPT will be widely used and integrated into all text editing programs. Advanced systems should be developed that focus on identifying even the slightest manipulations of data by ChatGPT. Currently, recognizing outputs from ChatGPT requires careful editing, and its inability to accurately cite resources poses challenges. However, ongoing research aims to address these issues and propose effective solutions. Journals should implement strict guidelines regarding the use of AI in academic papers to minimize misuse. Educators can alter assignment questions to prioritize critical thinking skills rather than merely relying on detecting the limitations of ChatGPT to identify potential academic misconduct, thereby limiting opportunities for improper use of technology. Although ChatGPT is not connected to the internet and has limited knowledge, it may produce inaccurate or biased content. However, users can provide feedback using the “thumbs down” button, allowing ChatGPT to learn and improve its responses. Additionally, responses generated by AI trainers reviewing ChatGPT can enhance the system’s performance. The collected data is securely stored to ensure user privacy and can be deleted upon request.
6. Discussion
ChatGPT is a tool that can provide assistance in various fields of healthcare and medicine, such as constructing scientific literature, analyzing vast amounts of literature, and serving as a conversational agent. It has numerous advantages and applications within the system, but they cannot be implemented without understanding and acknowledging its limitations and potential ethical issues, such as copyright violations, biases, and accountability dilemmas. ChatGPT can significantly reduce the time required to perform various tasks. However, its use in summarizing patient data, research tasks, and AI-enabled symptom checkers is limited to a few individuals. If used wisely, the time saved by using ChatGPT can be allocated to more productive and prioritized tasks. It can also be used by healthcare professionals to translate and explain patient medical records or diagnoses in a more patient-friendly manner.
Overcoming the current limitations of ChatGPT, such as improving and training the chatbot to provide 100% accurate and unbiased information from sources, is crucial for addressing the accountability issues that prevent most journals from allowing ChatGPT as an author. However, some preprint servers permit the submission of ChatGPT as an author alongside human authors. To address the accountability dilemma, one possible solution is for authors to clearly explain in their paper’s methods or other relevant sections how they used ChatGPT as a tool to assist their research. This can help journals and readers recognize ChatGPT’s role in the research process and ensure transparency. Establishing appropriate protocols and delineating clear boundaries of responsibility can help mitigate the risks associated with using ChatGPT for research and writing. With proper oversight, ChatGPT can assist all professionals from medical students to doctors in completing their professional tasks and help them work efficiently.
7. Conclusion
ChatGPT is a cutting-edge language model with numerous advantages and applications in healthcare and medicine. It can assist healthcare professionals in various tasks such as research, diagnosis, patient monitoring, and medical education. However, using ChatGPT also raises several ethical considerations and limitations, such as credibility, plagiarism, copyright infringement, and bias. Therefore, a thorough assessment and resolution of potential limitations and ethical considerations are necessary before implementing ChatGPT. Future research can focus on developing methods to mitigate these limitations while leveraging the benefits of ChatGPT in healthcare and medicine.
To promote communication and innovation in the antibody industry, October 16-17, 2024The 7th Golden Autumn Antibody Industry Development Conference is coming as scheduled. The conference aims to provide researchers with an interactive platform to facilitate the further development of the antibody industry.
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