The Promise and Pitfalls of AI in Primary Care

Near the end of 2022, a group called OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. It may have seemed like a novelty at first (e.g., “Write a poem about Medicare in the style of Hamilton”), but it soon became apparent that ChatGPT and AI models like it could have huge implications for education, business, and even medicine.

By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, reaching 100 million users in just two months (TikTok held the previous record at nine months).¹ Before the end of the year, other companies launched similar products, such as Google's Bard (now Gemini) and Microsoft's Bing Chat (now Copilot).

AI is here to stay and will likely become more embedded in our daily lives in the coming years. If used properly, it could be a tremendous boon to primary care physicians, potentially ridding us of administrative tasks that are a leading source of burnout.² But, as with any new technology, there are downsides. This article seeks to illuminate some of the ways AI can help primary care practices now and in the near future — and some of the ways AI could be downright dangerous.

At its most basic, AI is when computers try to mimic how the human brain works, learning from the information (data) they take in and becoming progressively more capable.

AI has existed in various forms for decades, but what's different about ChatGPT and other LLMs is the sheer amount of data they are able to process and their ability to be “generative.” Generative AI can take a prompt from a user (an input as text, image, etc.) and can output almost instantly a novel response based on what it has learned from a massive corpus of existing data. Using Google or another traditional search engine is like looking through books in a library yourself and copying down what one author wrote. But using a generative AI program is like having an assistant who can look through all the books in the library and synthesize all of that information into a brand new answer.