AI in Medical Education - Everything, everywhere, all at once? (Part 1/3)

By Michael Co, Chief Medical Advisor, BME Innovation

Everything, everywhere, all at once

Every day it seems, there is a new, bewildering or frightening story about artificial intelligence (AI) in the news - how it’s going to steal our jobs, spread fake news on a colossal scale, and then gradually taking over the world... Whether you like it or not, AI is undoubtedly one of the hottest topics this year. The use of AI is so broad to cover across different industries from arts to science. It has successfully integrated into our daily living, and is now truly in everything, everywhere, all at once.

Many of us might have found AI to be the key to convenience. However, the evolution of AI has been so rapid that people have started to worry about the negative impacts that AI could brought to the human mankind. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has hosted the world’s first Global Summit on AI Safety in Autumn this year at Bletchley Park, the home of top-secret codebreakers during the WWII.

Challenges and opportunities, is AI going to take over the world?

In fact, AI is not at all new. It could be as old as our grannies - The use of AI can be dated back to the 1940s. It was initially known as the artificial neural network, and has been in our daily living for decades, from facial recognition functions in our cameras to news feed selections on our social media. It is the emergence of generative AI that has sparked the global concern on ethical and safety issues on the use of AI.

ChatGPT is an example of generative AI. It is a pre-trained language model capable in generating updated and relevant outputs based on the references and commands provided by the operator. Various tertiary institutions have different attitudes towards this new technology earlier this year: some universities actively integrate ChatGPT into learning, some others discourage the use of ChatGPT by students, and some even banned students from using ChatGPT for assignments.

While it is true that generative AI is posing substantial challenges in medical education, including ChatGPT plagiarism. It is crucial that we, as medical educators, think how we could turn those challenges into opportunities. To me, ChatGPT is a real opportunity for us all, we should welcome it with open arms.

To be continued....