The Dawn of Generative AI in Medicine: Empathy Through Emulation

Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have significantly impacted multiple sectors of our society, including healthcare. While conventional AI has been instrumental in solving mainly image recognition tasks and thereby adding in well-defined situations such as supporting diagnostic imaging, the emergence of generative AI is impacting on one of the main professional competences: doctor-patient interaction.A convergence of natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI is exemplified by intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT. A first study that has compared the empathy and quality of responses between ChatGPT and human physicians in a healthcare setting has shown that ChatGPT can outperform human physicians in both quality and empathy of answers to medical questions. The results suggest that generative AI models like ChatGPT could serve as valuable adjuncts in medical consultations, potentially improving patient engagement and reducing clinician workload.