Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, and dental education: Implications for reflective assignments and qualitative research

IntroductionReflections enable students to gain additional value from a given experience. The use of Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT, OpenAI Incorporated) has gained momentum, but its impact on dental education is understudied.ObjectivesTo assess whether or not university instructors can differentiate reflections generated by ChatGPT from those generated by students, and to assess whether or not the content of a thematic analysis generated by ChatGPT differs from that generated by qualitative researchers on the same reflections.MethodsHardcopies of 20 reflections (10 generated by undergraduate dental students and 10 generated by ChatGPT) were distributed to three instructors who had at least 5 years of teaching experience. Instructors were asked to assign either 'ChatGPT' or 'student' to each reflection. Ten of these reflections (five generated by undergraduate dental students and five generated by ChatGPT) were randomly selected and distributed to two qualitative researchers who were asked to perform a brief thematic analysis with codes and themes. The same ten reflections were also thematically analyzed by ChatGPT.ResultsThe three instructors correctly determined whether the reflections were student or ChatGPT generated 85% of the time. Most disagreements (40%) happened with the reflections generated by ChatGPT, as the instructors thought to be generated by students. The thematic analyses did not differ substantially when comparing the codes and themes produced by the two researchers with those generated by ChatGPT.ConclusionsInstructors could differentiate between reflections generated by ChatGPT or by students most of the time. The overall content of a thematic analysis generated by the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT did not differ from that generated by qualitative researchers. Overall, the promising applications of ChatGPT will likely generate a paradigm shift in (dental) health education, research, and practice.