Shivdev K Rao, Elliot K Fishman, Ryan C Rizk, Linda C Chu, Steven P Rowe
J Am Coll Radiol . 2024 Jan 12:S1546-1440(24)00005-X. doi: 10.1016/j.jacr.2024.01.003. Online ahead of print.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI), specifically the large language models (LLMs) that underlie impressive new applications such as ChatGPT, are already fundamentally changing medicine. Unlike more traditional AI systems that produce simple outputs such as a number (say, the predicted length of stay for a patient in the hospital) or a category (say, “malignant” or “benign” for a radiologic system), “generative AI” refers broadly to systems whose outputs take the form of more unstructured media objects, such as images and documents. Under the hood, many of these systems are actually built by executing models that serve a more classical purpose. Generative text models, for example, generate whole documents by iteratively predicting “what word comes next.” But the ability to produce a whole document with desired properties unlocks a host of exciting applications.