The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots has opened up new possibilities for doctors and patients — but the technology also comes with the risk of misdiagnosis, data privacy issues and biases in decision-making.
One of the most popular examples is ChatGPT, which can mimic human conversations and create personalized medical advice. In fact, it recently passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam.
And because of its ability to generate human-like responses, some experts believe ChatGPT could help doctors with paperwork, examine X-rays (the platform is capable of reading photos) and weigh in on a patient’s surgery.
The software could potentially become as crucial for doctors as the stethoscope was in the last century for the medical field, said Dr. Robert Pearl, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
“It just won’t be possible to provide the best cutting-edge medicine in the future (without it),” he said, adding the platform is still years away from reaching its full potential.
“The current version of ChatGPT needs to be understood as a toy,” he said. “It’s probably two per cent of what’s going to happen in the future.”
This is because generative AI can increase in power and effectiveness, doubling every six to 10 months, according to researchers.
Developed by OpenAI, and released for testing to the general public in November 2022, ChatGPT had explosive uptake. After its release, over a million people signed up to use it in just five days, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The software is currently free as it sits in its research phase, though there are plans to eventually charge.
“We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering,” Altman said online on Dec. 5, 2022.
Although ChatGPT is a relatively new platform, the idea of AI and health care has been around for years.
In 2007, IBM created an open-domain question–answering system, named Watson, which won first place on the television game show Jeopardy!
Ten years later, a team of scientists used Watson to successfully identify new RNA-binding proteins that were altered in the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), highlighting the use of AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery in neurological disorders.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the University of Waterloo developed AI models that predicted which COVID-19 patients were most likely to have severe kidney injury outcomes while they are in hospital.
What sets ChatGPT apart from the other AI platforms is its ability to communicate, said Huda Idrees, founder and CEO of Dot Health, a health data tracker.
“Within a health-care context, communicating with clients — for example, if someone needs to write a longish letter describing their care plan — it makes sense to use ChatGPT. It would save doctors a lot of time,” she said. “So from an efficiency perspective, I see it as a very strong communication tool.”
Its communication is so effective that a JAMA study published April 28 found ChatGPT may have better bedside manners than some doctors.
The study had 195 randomly drawn patient questions and compared physicians’ and the chatbot’s answers. The chatbot responses were preferred over physician responses and rated significantly higher for both quality and empathy.
