The uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine have been growing in many areas, including in the analysis of medical images, the detection of drug interactions, the identification of high-risk patients, and the coding of medical notes. Several such uses of AI are the topics of the “AI in Medicine” review article series that debuts in this issue of the Journal. Here we describe another type of AI, the medical AI chatbot. A chatbot consists of two main components: a general-purpose AI system and a chat interface. This article considers specifically an AI system called GPT-4 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 4) with a chat interface; this system is widely available and in active development by Open AI, an AI research and deployment company.

“We predict that chatbots will be used by medical professionals, as well as by patients, with increasing frequency. Perhaps the most important point is that GPT-4 is not an end in and of itself. It is the opening of a door to new possibilities as well as new risks. We speculate that GPT-4 will soon be followed by even more powerful and capable AI systems — a series of increasingly powerful and generally intelligent machines. These machines are tools, and like all tools, they can be used for good but have the potential to cause harm. If used carefully and with an appropriate degree of caution, these evolving tools have the potential to help healthcare providers give the best care possible.”

Read more here.

References

  1. Lee, P., Bubeck, S., & Petro, J. (2023). Benefits, Limits, and Risks of GPT-4 as an AI Chatbot for Medicine. The New England Journal of Medicine, 388(13), 1233–1239. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsr2214184

Disclaimers

  • The material in these reviews is from various public open-access sources, meant for educational and informational purposes only
  • Any personal opinions expressed are those of only the author(s) and are not intended to represent the position of any organization(s)
  • No official support by any organization(s) has been provided or should be inferred