Use of ChatGPT: What does it mean for biology and environmental science?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) have emerged as important technologies. Recently, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) has been released and attracted massive interest from the public, owing to its unique capabilities to simplify many daily tasks of people from diverse backgrounds and social statuses. Here, we discuss how ChatGPT (and similar AI technologies) can impact biology and environmental science, providing examples obtained through interactive sessions with ChatGPT. The benefits that ChatGPT offers are ample and can impact many aspects of biology and environmental science, including education, research, scientific publishing, outreach, and societal translation. Among others, ChatGPT can simplify and expedite highly complex and challenging tasks. As an example to illustrate this, we provide 100 important questions for biology and 100 important questions for environmental science. Although ChatGPT offers a plethora of benefits, there are several risks and potential harms associated with its use, which we analyze herein. Awareness of risks and potential harms should be raised. However, understanding and overcoming the current limitations could lead these recent technological advances to push biology and environmental science to their limits.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Biology; ChatGPT; Environmental science; Generative Pre-trained Transformer; Large language model.