The imperative for regulatory oversight of large language models (or generative AI) in healthcare

🤖 Plain-English Summary

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of sophisticated large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Bard. We argue that regulatory oversight should assure medical professionals and patients can use LLMs without causing harm or compromising their data or privacy.

🔑 Key Findings

• The potential implementation of LLMs in healthcare settings has already garnered considerable attention because of their diverse applications that include facilitating clinical documentation, obtaining insurance pre-authorization, summarizing research papers, or working as a chatbot to answer questions for patients about their specific data and concerns.
• While offering transformative potential, LLMs warrant a very cautious approach since these models are trained differently from AI-based medical technologies that are regulated already, especially within the critical context of caring for patients.
• The newest version, GPT-4, that was released in March, 2023, brings the potentials of this technology to support multiple medical tasks; and risks from mishandling results it provides to varying reliability to a new level.

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