ChatGPT Is Trending: Trust but Verify

What is ChatGPT? Figure 1 is the response I received from ChatGPT when I asked it that question. Actually, this was the third response generated by ChatGPT. I kept asking it to "regenerate response" and this is the one I thought would be best understood by a broad audience.

My answer to "What is ChatGPT?" is that ChatGPT is a trending artificial intelligence (AI) tool released on November 30, 2022,¹ by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company based in the United States. The tool uses a large language model to make statistical predictions of patterns in vast amounts of data that can be used to generate text-based outputs such as answers to questions or generation of abstracts or essays by mimicking patterns it has learned.

ChatGPT is just one of an increasing number of AI tools seen in nursing practice, academia, and research, and its use is rapidly increasing throughout the health care industry and beyond. Last year, this column examined the different types of AI and discussed an issue with an AI-enabled tool intended to predict sepsis in Epic electronic health records (EHRs).² ChatGPT is a type of AI known as generative AI, which uses algorithms to create new content. In the case of ChatGPT, that new content is in the form of text.