The now and future of ChatGPT and GPT in psychiatry

Abstract

ChatGPT has sparked extensive discussions within the healthcare community since its November 2022 release. However, potential applications in the field of psychiatry have received limited attention. Deep learning has proven beneficial to psychiatry, and GPT is a powerful deep learning‐based language model with immense potential for this field. Despite the convenience of ChatGPT, this advanced chatbot currently has limited practical applications in psychiatry. It may be used to support psychiatrists in routine tasks such as completing medical records, facilitating communications between clinicians and with patients, polishing academic writings and presentations, and programming and performing analyses for research. The current training and application of ChatGPT require using appropriate prompts to maximize appropriate outputs and minimize deleterious inaccuracies and phantom errors. Moreover, future GPT advances that incorporate empathy, emotion recognition, personality assessment, and detection of mental health warning signs are essential for its effective integration into psychiatric care. In the near future, developing a fully‐automated psychotherapy system trained for expert communication (such as psychotherapy verbatim) is conceivable by building on foundational GPT technology. This dream system should integrate practical ‘real world’ inputs and friendly AI user and patient interfaces via clinically validated algorithms, voice comprehension/generation modules, and emotion discrimination algorithms based on facial expressions and physiological inputs from wearable devices. In addition to the technology challenges, we believe it is critical to establish generally accepted ethical standards for applying ChatGPT‐related tools in all mental healthcare environments, including telemedicine and academic/training settings.