LAUSR

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Reuse permitted under CC BYNC. No commercial reuse. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. Now that’s what you call technical disruption: When has a technical invention ever spread so quickly since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007? One million users in 5 days... It’s like the world has been eagerly waiting for this one application. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has hit the widest scale and is being celebrated by the press. ChatGPT explains, analyses and creates knowledge from the internet, replacing Google’s pure keyword search in no time. And it is reduced to the mother of all user interfaces: the chatbot. ChatGPT creates creative texts as well as factbased scientific essays and can automatically programme other algorithms. Anyone can use it, from the average consumer to the quantum researcher... Gone are the days when we almost bashfully searched Google instead of PubMed for medical evidence or case reports. ChatGPT is now also integrated in Microsoft’s search engine Bing and combines keyword search with syntax and the possibility of interactive conversations. Is our need for convenience so great that, with speech recognition almost mature, we could also use automated speech generation? Or is ChatGPT (I’d like to say &Co, but there is no &Co yet) really this incredible lever on all levels of society, including medicine and research? And why did the artificial intelligence (AI) architecture of the ‘generative pretrained transformer’ (GPT) so easily outgun previous algorithms such as Google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and triggered a code red there? Back to the beginning. It is Sunday 11 December 2022 in Paris at the Expo Porte de Versailles. I am in the queue to register for the French Congress of Rheumatology. A friend of mine (a psychiatrist) calls me excitedly because he knows I am scientifically interested in AI and we are working together on a project about digital treatment for fibromyalgia and depression. He tells me about ChatGPT: ‘This chatbot changes everything, it is simply brilliant linguistically, even in German’! Over 3 months have passed since then. And it’s true: The machine creates unlimited, realtime factbased texts in a way that no human could ever do. From poems to introductions or discussions of scientific texts. ChatGPT can programme in Python and create algorithms, which could perhaps help to make better use of clinical data, for example.