CLINICAL QUESTION
How will ChatGPT affect medical education?
Explore This Issue
April 2024BOTTOM LINE
If writers understand ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses, they can harness its power to make their processes more efficient and their products more robust, leveraging the tool to their advantage.
COMMENT: Lorelei Lingard is a master linguist and medical education researcher. She discusses practical tips and tricks for using ChatGPT with academic clinicians every day. This includes giving ChatGPT the proper context, using incremental prompting, being on the lookout for hallucinations, and being careful about references as modern large language models still haven’t mastered this craft yet. —Eric Gantwerker, MD, MSc, MS
BACKGROUND: Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Chat GPT has raised concerns across academia about its potential effect on traditional knowledge assessments and scientific integrity. Major journals are declaring their positions on the issue, and academic medicine guides authors to disclose and describe their use of AI tools in scholarship.
STUDY DESIGN: Educational report.
SETTING: Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, Calif.
SYNOPSIS: In this report, the author discusses the capacity, implications, and limitations of ChatGPT use in academic writing. ChatGPT is defined as an AI large language model that excels at processing, distilling, and presenting information verbally in human-like text. As such, it can save academic writers time and labor. Although ChatGPT generates grammatically correct and semantically meaningful responses, it is not always accurate and does not store or retrieve data. The user “trains” ChatGPT through incremental prompting to focus its attention. Therefore, users must already know content well to judge the quality of the responses. It is possible to use the tool to generate outlines, summaries, abstracts, and counterarguments. It can also aid writers in strengthening a draft’s clarity and coherence and serve as a free language editor for scholars writing in English as a second language. In terms of ethics, the author advises writers against having ChatGPT write for them, but rather, recommends that they put their own writing into ChatGPT and let it make suggestions, handle tiresome tasks such as cutting length, and illustrate grammatical changes.
CITATION: Lingard L. Writing with ChatGPT: An illustration of its capacity, limitations, and implications for academic writers. Perspect Med Educ. 2023;12:261–270.