ChatGTP: What is it and how can nursing and health science education use it?

Artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize health science education. And it is happening now. The most recent reason? ChatGPT—a newly available Chatbot AI with pronounced synthesis and language capabilities (OpenAI, 2023). Like previous tech interventions and platforms, such as Twitter, that revolutionized communication and influenced research and public discourses in the health sciences, ChatGPT will not only influence health education, practice and research, but will shift them profoundly. While the time to fully pre-empt ChatGPT development is past, the opportunity for nursing to respond well has not. But first, ChatGPT and its possible impacts on higher education in the health sciences must be considered. Here, we introduce ChatGPT, highlight its likely impact on higher education, and what nursing and the health sciences can do about it. ChatGPT is an AI trained as an interactive conversational model chatbot capable of responding to prompts in various text formats (Gleason, 2022; OpenAI, 2023). ChatGPT runs off of GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-3), the technology underlying its ability to understand and generate text. This means the application can perform more sophisticated functions in response to users' entries, including—seeking and clarifying through follow-up questions, challenging underlying definitions, and stating and questioning assumptions—among many. There are clear parallels between this and many other scholarly discourses—including the production and evaluation of student writing, conference conversations, and academic publications (Kamler Graham, 2022; Wingard, 2023) While Chatbots and AI have existed for approximately 60 and 70 years, respectively (Ina, 2022), ChatGPT is different. It will have a transformative effect on higher education, especially around writing and student work. First, it is “generative.” ChatGPT can create new text based on a range of inputs, avoiding the rote and repetitive responses of other AI chatbots—a glaring clue for any customer using a commercial AI customer service chat they are not, after all, having their complaint heard by a real person. ChatGPT can also demonstrate sensitivity to context and, from this, it can generate text that sounds natural—more human. Second, ChatGPT is a free to use application, thereby removing the pay-to-access barrier experienced by students seeking to access other AI applications. Given this, and its remarkable capacities, ChatGPT had over 1 million users within the first 5 days of its release (Gleason, 2022). Third, ChatGPT provides virtually instant, comprehensive and logical text responses in any format and genre requested of it (including numerous essay, prose, tweets, LinkedIn posts, or columns). Crucially, some authors report that this text is undetectable by current plagiarism software. For instance, Gleason (2022) asserted that there is no way to prove that ChatGPT generated text is AI generated. Fourth, the scale and complexity of ChatGPT is remarkable; it is among the largest language models ever created with 175 billion parameters, enabling ChatGPT to avoid rigid, script-based responses (OpenAI, 2023). The ability of ChatGPT to respond like a human would is its greatest strength—and paradoxically its greatest risk in scenarios in which a human response is necessary for ethical and scholarly standards and integrity. The possible impacts of ChatGPT on higher education are transformative, and ChatGPT is testing our ability to envision and respond to these. Should those in nursing and other parts of higher education integrate ChatGPT in the service of learning, avoid considering its impact altogether, or acknowledge it but prohibit students' engagement, assuming then that students will abide by this regulation? To address these vital questions first, we asked ChatGPT what its likely impacts are going to be on higher education. Its response was as follows: It is worth noting that GPT-3, although powerful, is not a silver bullet solution for all problems in education and proper implementation and ethical use of the technology is important. Also, there may be some concerns with privacy and security when using GPT-3 in educational settings.” ChatGPT was able to provide this coherent, cogent and very human-like response within 10s of receiving the query. It was equally capable of responding meaningfully to follow-up prompts, providing additional information, depth and clarity in its responses, and composing tweets and LinkedIn postings to address the topic. As ChatGPT itself indicated, its profile in higher education is one of balancing benefits with risks, and hence, considering various stances towards its use can help educators and educational institutions makes such critical decisions. Here, we present three different hypothetical case scenarios reflecting responses to ChatGPT by nursing and the health sciences, postulating possible impacts for each. Previously, we argued that Twitter was a conversation that would be ongoing regardless of nursings' acceptance of it (Archibald (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content. This writing received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors.