GPT-4 as an AI Chatbot for Medicine: Benefits, Limits, and Risks (NEJM 2023)
The uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine have been growing in many areas, including in the analysis of medical images, (1) the detection of drug interactions, (2) the identification of high-risk patients, (3) and the coding of medical notes. (4) 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. AI Chatbot Technology 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 OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company. 5 To use a chatbot, one starts a “session” by entering a query — usually referred to as a “prompt” — in plain natural language. Typically, but not always, the user is a human being. The ch...