Paging Dr. AI? What ChatGPT and artificial intelligence could mean for the future of medicine

Without cracking a single textbook, without spending a day in medical school, the co-author of a preprint study correctly answered enough practice questions that it would have passed the real US Medical Licensing Examination. But the test-taker wasn't a member of Mensa or a medical savant; it was the artificial intelligence ChatGPT. The tool, which was created to answer user questions in a conversational manner, has generated so much buzz that doctors and scientists are trying to determine what its limitations are – and what it could do for health and medicine. ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a natural language-processing tool driven by artificial intelligence. The technology, created by San Francisco-based OpenAI and launched in November, is not like a well-spoken search engine.