Implications of large language models such as ChatGPT for dental medicine

This article provides an overview of the implications of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) for dental medicine.

ChatGPT, a LLM trained on massive amounts of textual data, is adept at fulfilling various language-related tasks. Despite its impressive capabilities, ChatGPT has serious limitations, such as occasionally giving incorrect answers, producing nonsensical content, and presenting misinformation as fact. Dental practitioners, assistants, and hygienists are not likely to be significantly impacted by LLMs. However, LLMs could affect the work of administrative personnel and the provision of dental telemedicine. LLMs offer potential for clinical decision support, text summarization, efficient writing, and multilingual communication. As more people seek health information from LLMs, it is crucial to safeguard against inaccurate, outdated, and biased responses to health-related queries. LLMs pose challenges for patient data confidentiality and cybersecurity that must be tackled. In dental education, LLMs present fewer challenges than in other academic fields. LLMs can enhance academic writing fluency, but acceptable usage boundaries in science need to be established.

While LLMs such as ChatGPT may have various useful applications in dental medicine, they come with risks of malicious use and serious limitations, including the potential for misinformation.

Along with the potential benefits of using LLMs as an additional tool in dental medicine, it is crucial to carefully consider the limitations and potential risks inherent in such artificial intelligence technologies.