New wave of generative AI is appearing in healthcare

BY JERRY ZEIDENBERG

Why all the fuss about ChatGPT and other forms of ‘generative AI’, which are said to be a new wave of artificial intelligence?

“It’s an amazing evolution of AI,” commented Dr. David Rhew, chief medical officer and VP of Healthcare for Microsoft, in an interview with CHT. “Previously, with AI, really only data scientists could work with it. But ChatGPT offers an interface that everyday people can understand. Anyone can use ChatGPT to manipulate large data sets to obtain answers. It’s leading to the democratization of AI.”

Thanks to ultrafast computers and networks, generative AI systems can process massive stores of knowledge. Using this data, they can write essays and stories, produce songs and paintings, and they can even conduct very good diagnoses in a medical setting. In a word, they can ‘generate’ new knowledge, hence the moniker generative AI. Tests of ChatGPT have shown the system can even pass the U.S. medical school exams.

Not only can it answer true and false questions, but it can also produce an accurate diagnosis when told the symptoms that a mock patient is presenting with and their lab test results. It’s just the kind of information a doctor gets in a medical office, when he or she must figure out what ails the patient.

“GenAI can answer these questions better than a lot of clinicians can, but it’s not always perfect,” said Dr. Rhew. From time to time, the latest iteration of GPT-4, which is found in the ChatGPT system, “hallucinates”. That’s tech-speak for making up answers. And occasionally, GPT simply gets things wrong.

That’s why Dr. Rhew believes the systems

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