Sir, the world of technology is buzzing with a new word - ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot which is trained to follow instructions in a prompt and provide a detailed response.1,2 Users can simply feed in their queries, and the chatbot will reply to them. Unlike other AI chatbots, ChatGPT can answer follow-up questions, admit their mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. As an example, Figure 1 shows text that was generated within three seconds when ChatGPT was instructed to ‘write a letter to the editor about artificial intelligence in dentistry in 300 words'.

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AI-generated text using ChatGPT

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ChatGPT was launched on 30 November 2022, by San Francisco-based OpenAI. It was co-founded by its current CEO, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk in 2015 and is presently funded by Microsoft and others. By 4 December 2022, OpenAI estimated ChatGPT already had over one million users. At its core, ChatGPT is a large language model and is an AI-powered conversational chatbot, which uses algorithms to analyse a massive corpus of text, often scraped from the internet, to respond to user requests in language that can sound surprisingly human.3

It is not free from errors or limitations. On its website, OpenAI admits that ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.4 While there is immense scope for AI in dentistry, academic and scientific journals will have serious issues to confront, as soon they will also need AI to detect whether the text was generated by AI or human intelligence.5