By now, many of us have tinkered with artificial intelligence (AI) by chatting with a GPT. If you live in North Carolina and have renewed your vehicle registration online lately you interacted with an AI chat bot. At the very least you have heard about amazing things it is capable of or perhaps dark concerns surrounding its use and the potential for disruption.
AI does have seemingly unlimited uses and does threaten to upend many domains and disciplines, and will replace many manual roles with “smart” automation. While we can’t precisely predict the future of AI, we can see how it currently is being used in healthcare, and specifically how we are using it at Northwest AHEC.
On a recent episode of the Healthcare Insights in Northwest North Carolina podcast, Metin Gurcan shared ways AI has revolutionized diagnostics and some of the concerns that arise with its use in patient care. On another episode, Angela Sharkey discusses AI use in accelerating medical education. AI is certainly becoming a part of just about every aspect of the medical field, and at a faster and faster pace.
At Northwest AHEC, we have begun to use AI in various ways. We use it to draft social media and blog posts for our marketing (this post was NOT written using AI). We use it to generate email marketing subject lines to get better open rates. We use it to draft PowerPoint presentations, outlines, and agendas. And we use it to generate draft program objectives and activity descriptions.
Notice how I used “draft” in the paragraph above. AI is not perfect and the more you use it the better you get a spotting the errors, but it is great at generating ideas faster than anything before. It is like having a team of interns working for you. Sure, they are helpful, but their work still needs a check for accuracy. I once used it to draft a proposal for an hour workshop presentation proposal. The output was very useful, but when I added up the time - 10 minute introduction, 10 minute topic 1, etc. - the time added up to be almost 100 minutes. Lesson learned: check the math!
Another example is a course we produced for a statewide partnership on nicotine cessation in English and Spanish using AI avatars and translation. The Spanish version was translated in minutes with a click of a button. The video example below was created using an AI video generator; from start to finish the English version took a little under one hour to create, while the initial Spanish translation took less than 5 minutes!
I won’t go into detail about how AI uses language models or data sets for its training, nor will I try to explain the energy use demands (and who is actually paying for all those compute cycles) in this post. You can ask a GPT to tell you about all that. As you venture into the world of AI for your business, you would be well advised to think about the implications of how it impacts your business or practice.
There are many AI GPTs and image generators available, some free and some for a modest monthly fee. You can add files and resources in your AI prompts to get more precise responses and because of this, there are concerns with privacy and HIPPA violations, so as a healthcare business you will want to tread carefully with any AI service. And there are additional concerns with copyright and ownership of information - copyright protection is currently not available for works created using AI for example.
At Northwest AHEC we have revised our presenter agreements to include updated policies on content creation, quality and originality, copyright compliance, and disclosure because we realize that many of our subject matter experts – including our own – are using AI tools to create content to be delivered in continuing education activities such as the aforementioned nicotine cessation course. So be thoughtful and intentional about AI usage, because there is little doubt that it will show up in some way no matter your discipline.
The bottom line is that AI is here to stay. And it is only getting more and more powerful by the day. What was mind-blowing yesterday will be a normal part of today. If you look closely you will begin to see where it fits everywhere. Whether you are a seasoned prompt jockey or just beginning to look into it for your daily tasks, you will no doubt see where it can accelerate your productivity and perhaps even radically transform the way you conduct your profession.
Video generated by HeyGen:
