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Therapist Assistant - THER 140 - Recreation Therapy Assistant: Principles & Practice I

Library Course Guide for THER 140 Recreation Therapy Assistant: Principles & Practice I

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)

"May you live in interesting times."

Reportedly, an ancient Chinese curse.

It turns out it is neither Chinese nor Ancient.

 

Its origin has been traced to 1939 to an American politician named Frederic R. Coudert, who received it in a letter from a British colleague named Sir Austen Chamberlain, who had written the following to him: 

. . . by return mail he wrote to me and concluded as follows: “Many years ago, I learned from one of our diplomats in China that one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is ‘May you live in an interesting age.'”

In 1966, it morphed once  again when Robert F. Kennedy Sr., in his “Day of Affirmation Address” in Capetown, South Africa, changed the "interesting age" to “interesting times.”

Nonetheless, it appropriately describes the 'technologically disruptive' period in which we live, study, and work - 'Age of GenAI'. This is not meant as a criticism of GenAI. Indeed, GenAI offers many opportunities, however, we are still trying to determine it's acceptable uses within the  education process.  

AI is not a singular technology; it is a diverse and interconnected group of technologies, many of which find applications in the healthcare sector.

The concept of 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI) is not new. The idea was originally proposed by mathematician and pioneer computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1940s. One of Turing's biggest contributions to the field was the creation of the "Turing Test," originally named the 'imitation game' developed in the 1950s. It was designed to test a computer's ability to "exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human."  The test was first passed by a computer system in 2014. 

The Globe and Mail newspaper on September 14th, 2024 published "Revolution, interrupted: Why AI has failed to live up to the hype in drug development: One of the promises of machine learning was better medicine, faster. A decade in, that has yet to happen." The authors of the news article quote Brendan Frey, founder of Deep Genomics “AI has really let us all down in the last decade when it comes to drug discovery...We’ve just seen failure after failure.”

 

GenAI 

Gartner Hype Cycle 

 

 

 

The real skill you will need to use GenAI is knowing how to Prompt (explain) to the system what you want it to do.

This will take:

  • Time

    • To learn to write prompts that provide the information you need

    • You may have to run multiple iterations of your query.

    • Then, you will have to develop a research plan to identify and properly cite the information provided by the GenAI response. 

    • You will need an above-average knowledge of medical and healthcare words and terminology to get proper value from using GenAI,

  • Money

    • The free versions of most GenAI applications are 'loss leaders'  and are designed to interest you. For example, ChatGPT3 is free but limits you to the number of Prompts you can submit daily.

    • ChatGPT4 is a fee based service

    • The cost of using a GenAI applications total rest with the user

  • Using PICO(T) will help with writing better GenAI Prompts

GenAI hallucination is a phenomenon in which the large language model (LLM)—often a generative model—is inaccurate or made up.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) released its Interim Guidance—Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine in April 2024.

The Canadian Physiotherapy Association is investigating the use of GenAI as is the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (COAT). 

GenAI uses LLMs that are designed to predict the next best possible word based on their training data set; there is always the possibility of bias in the results produced by GenAI tools due to the inherent bias in the data used to build it. You should constantly closely scrutinize any results from GenAI for potential bias in the text it provides you.

REMEMBER GENAI HAS BEEN PRIMARILY TRAINED ON DATA FROM THE WEB

Bias to be aware of:

  • Under-representation of specific people or groups 

  • Discrimination

  • Misinformation and Disinformation

  • Denialism 

  • Plagiarization

  • Research Fraud

As a general rule of thumb, never upload any personal information to a Gen AI tool.

In B.C., Collection, use, disclosure and retention of personal information is subject to and must comply with the provisions of the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). 

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