Is ChatGPT Healthcare’s Next Big Thing?

By Beth Plumptre, Drug Topics

Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize and improve medicine. However, in order for widespread implementation, certain challenges and obstacles must first be overcome.

In November 2022 the world was introduced to ChatGPT—an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot capable of mirroring intuitive human conversation. Since then, this technology has captured the attention of millions that have employed it to write everything from songs and poetry to essays and python code.

In medicine, ChatGPT is a major topic of conversation among providers and patients alike. This innovation has the potential to automate daily tasks like generating patient records or writing reports. While still in the early stages of development and use, it is projected to feature diagnostic and treatment use in the future.

But like other AI systems, ChatGPT has challenges, and further testing to undergo before achieving widespread use in health care.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is the latest evolution of a language model developed by OpenAI known as GPT-3. ChatGPT is trained on extensive amounts of data to learn language patterns. The process is designed to ensure accuracy when predicting what comes next in a sequence of words.

ChatGPT is taught and refined using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning. IBM explains the former as the “use of labeled datasets to train algorithms to classify data or predict outcomes accurately.” This approach instructs computers how to learn or identify topics.

ChatGPT is optimized through reinforcement learning from human feedback. Here, human experts teach the machine likely and ethical responses, or decisions to support users. Open AI describes ChatGPT’s dialogue features as being able to “answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

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