ChatGPT in Healthcare Writing: Advantages and Limitations
Article information
New technologies, including the Internet of Things, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), artificial intelligence (AI), and telecommunication networks, have effectively motivated and facilitated the learning and enhancement of knowledge for everyone. This enables more efficient and beneficial use of digital resources [1,2]. The continuation of this process not only leads to the adoption of methods with excellent and effective characteristics but also drives innovation in the digital world [3]. ChatGPT enables healthcare users to communicate via accessible platforms using text or voice to address their queries [4].
1. Emergence of ChatGPT
The introduction of ChatGPT into the healthcare industry marks a significant evolution and holds great potential for enhancing medical writing. It serves as a reliable information source for researchers, which is a crucial application of ChatGPT in this field. ChatGPT utilizes built-in transformers tailored to the desired model to process medical texts and generate appropriate responses. It is important to note that this AI technique can discern subtle linguistic differences through its training. Generally, based on the content discussed, ChatGPT can be regarded as a significant AI technology capable of processing requests and delivering responses that closely mimic human interaction [5]. ChatGPT is an advanced large language model trained on extensive text datasets specifically for user interactions. While AI-based language models like ChatGPT have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their effectiveness in real-world applications, particularly in complex fields like medicine that require high-level cognitive skills, remains to be fully assessed [6]. However, the available evidence suggests that healthcare professionals are optimistic about ChatGPT’s vast potential in enhancing clinical decision-making and optimizing clinical workflows [7–9].
2. Advantages
Recent studies have demonstrated that ChatGPT can deliver appropriate and relevant responses to a broad array of questions, surpassing previous models in both accuracy and efficiency [10,11]. Furthermore, ChatGPT has proven its capability to produce coherent and well-structured text, which is beneficial for tasks such as content creation and summarization [12]. In healthcare writing, ChatGPT offers significant opportunities, including enhanced data gathering and analysis, enhanced communication and accessibility, and support for researchers across various medical research domains [13]. Additionally, ChatGPT’s advantages include natural language generation and scalability, which facilitate meaningful conversations and rapid processing of requests. However, these capabilities also result in a high volume of conversations being managed simultaneously by the system [5]. Overall, ChatGPT boasts benefits such as efficiency, effectiveness, compatibility, exceptional accuracy, cost-effectiveness, content production, and text translation [14].
3. Limitations
Along with its advantages, ChatGPT also has disadvantages. Key challenges include biases stemming from limitations in training data, ethical concerns, technical constraints, and shortcomings in data collection and analysis [13]. Emotional intelligence—often conceptualized in terms of the emotional quotient (EQ)—is another shortcoming of ChatGPT. EQ refers to the ability to positively understand, use, and manage one’s emotions to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict [15]. Although emotional indicators should be taken into account in conversations and other forms of communication, ChatGPT may have a limited response to emotional indicators, which may be boring for users. The lack of proper empathy can be frustrating for users and cause an unpleasant experience that deters repeated use of system [5]. Bias in responses is another notable drawback. It is crucial to acknowledge that the information set used for training contains inherent biases and inaccuracies, affecting the system’s performance. Since ChatGPT’s responses are solely based on its training data, it may struggle to address more specialized topics accurately from the users’ perspective, leading to uncertainties regarding the correctness of its responses [16].
4. Existing Challenges
In today’s world, manuscript writing is a specialized task that is challenging for many people. ChatGPT has been introduced into this field; however, many healthcare professionals consider it neither effective nor useful. This perception has caused concern among doctors, who fear that their students might rely too heavily on this technology, thus putting minimal effort into their manuscript writing [17]. Despite these concerns, it is important to recognize that science is continually advancing. AI, a subject of much debate, has provided tools that support scientific progress and integrate with various aspects of human life, potentially having a significant impact. One notable impact is in the realm of academic publishing, where healthcare professionals can now submit articles that they have finalized after receiving initial editing from AI [18].
5. Ethical Considerations
Pretrained algorithm-based text generation in healthcare writing can result in biased content, misleading or inaccurate information, the omission of less commonly cited results, or data that are outdated, having been gathered before 2021. It is important to recognize that using ChatGPT involves ethical considerations and restrictions, including issues related to credit, plagiarism, and copyright infringement [19]. ChatGPT in healthcare offers a promising platform for standardizing access to medical information, enhancing patient engagement, and ultimately improving health outcomes. Nevertheless, ethical and legal considerations must be carefully evaluated to ensure its appropriate use prior to implementation [20].
6. Conclusion
ChatGPT can assist in healthcare writing, editing, formatting, creating summaries, and preparing medical texts, or other content that requires sorting and organizing data. However, it is essential to consider the limitations and ethical concerns associated with this technology in healthcare writing. Despite significant advancements in AI, ChatGPT can sometimes produce incorrect interpretations, necessitating further assistance and training for these systems to accurately interpret user requests. Given that the medical community often requires information on specific topics, writing a manuscript can be challenging. While ChatGPT can provide accurate and comprehensive responses, it may not fully understand all scenarios, potentially leading to inappropriate answers [5]. Therefore, it is important for healthcare researchers to focus on natural language processing research and the development and evaluation of expert language models tailored for healthcare writing. Further studies are also recommended to explore the future role of AI and ChatGPT in healthcare writing, with a focus on the accuracy of the information produced and the ethical implications.
Notes
Conflict of Interest
No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.