Welcome to the Medcopywriter Journal Club! In the inaugural post we look at a paper that discusses potential uses of ChatGPT in healthcare and medicine.
Citation
Dave T, et al. ChatGPT in medicine: an overview of its applications, advantages, limitations, future prospects, and ethical considerations. Front Artif Intell. 2023;6:1169595.
Overview
This article, published in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, discusses some of the potential applications and ethical considerations of ChatGPT in healthcare and medicine.
Summary
ChatGPT is an advanced AI language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text responses to prompts.
ChatGPT has a number of potential applications in medical writing, including:
Assisting in literature reviews
Identifying research topics
Generating summaries
More broadly, ChatGPT could also be used to aid diagnosis, clinical decision support, patient monitoring and education, and help manage health info and medications.
However, it also poses ethical and legal concerns, such as copyright infringement and inaccuracies in generated content. The accuracy of AI-generated text is dependent on training data quality, and there is a risk of incorrect outputs leading to legal issues. Other limitations include biases, lack of transparency, and difficulties in clarifying ambiguous prompts.
Key quote
"Overcoming the current limitations of ChatGPT, such as improving and training the chatbot to provide 100% accurate and unbiased information from the sources, is essential to address the accountability concerns that have prevented the majority of journals from allowing ChatGPT as an author."
Opinion
The article provides a balanced review of the major pros and cons of generative AI in healthcare and medicine
While the paper examines some of the potential applications and ethical considerations of ChatGPT, the authors fail to mention other AI language models, such as Bard, Bing, Claude or Gemini
More recent developments such as custom GPTs, which can allow you to create administrative assistants, online tutors, virtual patients, and more, are also not discussed
It would have been interesting to learn how medical communications agencies are using generative AI; in particular, medical writers
Finally, I'd like to have seen some example prompts within the article
What are your thoughts on the role of ChatGPT in medical writing? What policies or safeguards should be put in place as this technology continues advancing? Let us know in the comments!