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editorial
. 2023;11(4):225–226. doi: 10.22038/abjs.2023.22042

ChatGPT in Medicine; a Disruptive Innovation or Just One Step Forward?

Ali Parsa 1,2, Mohammad H Ebrahimzadeh 1
PMCID: PMC10167532  PMID: 37180295

Introduction

ChatGPT a fluent chatbot developed by San Francisco- based Open artificial intelligence (AI); has made a storm that swept the world since its launch in November 2022. It is enabled people to communicate with a machine in almost any topic.1 ChatGPT passed 100 million users at the beginning of February 2023 which making it as the fastest expanding consumer application.2

There is tremendous potential to incorporate modern artificial intelligence including ChatGPT for medical education. Recently, ChatGPT reached the passing scores for a third-year medical student. 3

New era of AI will improve patient education and health literacy by helping people better evaluation of their wellbeing status and reliable understanding of the risks and benefits of interventions. Patients can ask multiple questions and receive reliable responses in a short period of time.

Clinical workflow might utilize ChatGPT and future bots might help for writing medical notes, discharge summaries and scheduling patients. It can assist for making decision and treatment planning for the patients. It is a promise to ease physician`s repetitive daily tasks.

For medical educators and faculties, ChatGPT can facilitate writing course syllabi, advice for learning activities, lecture presentation and act as smart assist with student assessment, quiz, and test questions. Faculties can create automatic grading and feedback to students. 4

You can ask questions about specific ideas, and it can help to generate brainstorming creative ideas. Furthermore, it can write essays, home works for the medical students.

Next area is writing research papers, AIs can generate the draft of manuscripts by accessing to mega data. ChatGPT listed as author on research papers. Its legitimate application in article preparation has led to being cited as co-author on papers including at least two PubMed indexed articles. 5, 6

Despite meteoric rise of new AIs and ChatGPT, improper use and other challenges facing these technologies in medicine. 6 ChatGPT is not connected to the internet to provide current facts and literature. Instead, it programmed to find best words and texts to answer the questions. ChatGPT in its current status is “multilingual but monocultural” because it has learned from English language data (mainly US based) and is unable to reflect all cultures. 7 Another concern is access to sensitive medical information that might raise patient privacy concerns. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed that the data on which these types of AIs trained was unbiased. Any bias can lead to wrong clinical decision making. 8

Authorship is an important challenge for AIs. Springer Nature, the world`s largest academic publisher, has announced that AIs like ChatGPT are not eligible to be author of academic papers. 9

There are two main policies regarding authorship positions; the first one following ICMJE recommendations 10 and the second is the Nature criteria 11 which ChatGPT does not meet part of the necessary criteria.

In the near future these tools will be widely adopted in the medical field with no doubt. It is critical to modify regulations of scientific writing and provide new control mechanisms to identify any unethical utilization of ChatGPT and upcoming tools in medicine.

References

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Articles from Archives of Bone and Joint Surgery are provided here courtesy of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences

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