Artificial Intelligence and the practice of emergency medicine

Since the introduction of the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool “Chat GPT” in the fall of 2023, a new era in clinical diagnostics and clinical decision-making has begun, both within medicine in general and within emergency medicine in particular. These new “Generative AI” tools can be expected to influence and modify the clinical practice of emergency medicine, because they can derive new data and generate non-human generated rules, in a manner that prior “generations” of AI tools could not do. Therefore, to enable a fuller understanding of how and why Generative AI differs from prior AI tools, a review of the four “generations” of AI is first presented, with reference to some commonly known tools and outcomes related to each of these four “generations”. Then, having established how “Generative AI” represents the fourth and most recent version of AI, selected current and anticipated near-future impacts of that Generative AI upon the specialty of Emergency Medicine are discussed. The examples cited in this manuscript are illustrative but not exhaustive, as this field of inquiry is rapidly changing and updating. Hopefully, this publication will stimulate the reader to become more alert regarding how Generative AI is influencing their practice, and to become receptive to current and near-future changes of the practice of emergency medicine that will derive from the application of Generative AI tools in the emergency caregivers’ workplaces.