Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Editorial
. 2023 Feb 19;15(2):e35179.
doi: 10.7759/cureus.35179. eCollection 2023 Feb.

Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing

Hussam Alkaissi  1   2   3 , Samy I McFarlane  3
Affiliations
Editorial

Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing

Hussam Alkaissi et al. Cureus. .

Abstract

While still in its infancy, ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer), introduced in November 2022, is bound to hugely impact many industries, including healthcare, medical education, biomedical research, and scientific writing. Implications of ChatGPT, that new chatbot introduced by OpenAI on academic writing, is largely unknown. In response to the Journal of Medical Science (Cureus) Turing Test - call for case reports written with the assistance of ChatGPT, we present two cases one of homocystinuria-associated osteoporosis, and the other is on late-onset Pompe disease (LOPD), a rare metabolic disorder. We tested ChatGPT to write about the pathogenesis of these conditions. We documented the positive, negative, and rather troubling aspects of our newly introduced chatbot's performance.

Keywords: artificial intelligence and education; artificial intelligence and writing; artificial intelligence in medicine; chatbot; chatgpt.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Initial response of ChatGPT to provide a paragraph on the molecular mechanism and pathogenesis of homocystinuria-induced osteoporosis.
Figure 2
Figure 2. References provided by ChatGPT. PMID numbers correlated to different papers.
PMID: PubMed ID
Figure 3
Figure 3. Assay on a non-existing link between late-onset Pompe disease (LOPD) and liver involvement.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Survey of hallucination in natural language generation. Ji Z, Lee N, Frieske R, et al. ACM Comput Surv. 2022
    1. Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists. [Preprint] Gao CA, Howard FM, Nikolay S. bioRxiv. 2022
    1. Performance of ChatGPT on USMLE: potential for AI-assisted medical education using large language models. [Preprint] Kung TH, Cheatham M, ChatGPT ChatGPT, et al. medRxiv. 2022 - PMC - PubMed
    1. ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove. Stokel-Walker C. Nature. 2023;613:620–621. - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources