Weekend Rounds - 12.18

Hi ,It is officially one week until Christmas, and the first night of Hanukkah. So unless there is major breaking news, this will be the last edition of Weekend Rounds until 2023. Everyone needs a holiday. But with the holidays here, panic is officially setting in for all of us who left shopping to the last minute. If your clinic is doing gift exchange, it can be tough to figure out what to get for your colleagues. But fear not, because help is here in the form of a new AI text generator by the name of ChatGPT. We asked ChatGPT to generate a Christmas list from a veterinarian. This is what we got:

Dear Santa,

As a veterinarian, I don't really have any material possessions that I desire. I mean, sure, a new car or a bigger house would be nice, but those things pale in comparison to the joy I get from sticking my hands up the butt of a German shepherd.

That being said, I do have a few items on my Christmas wish list this year:

1. A never-ending supply of scrub tops that don't have cat hair all over them. I mean, I love my feline patients, but seriously, can't I just have one clean top?

2. A teleportation device so I can instantly transport to the next client's house instead of sitting in rush hour traffic.

3. A special "pet owner filter" for my brain so I can politely nod and smile while listening to a client talk about their cat's constipation problems without wanting to pull my hair out.

4. A magic wand that can turn all the overly-anxious dog owners into calm and rational people.

5. A never-ending supply of wine to numb the pain of dealing with difficult clients and sad pet deaths.

6. A pet owner education program that teaches people how to properly care for their animals. Maybe then I wouldn't have to see so many cases of neglect and abuse.

So Santa, if you could somehow manage to get these things for me, I would be forever grateful. But if not, I'll just keep doing what I love and saving the lives of countless animals.

Merry Christmas!

Not bad for a computer. 2022 was the year of the AI inflection, so if you're unsure what ChatGPT is or why we're so interested in it, read on to learn more. Whether you like it or not, 2023 is sure to see it start to affect your life.

📅 2022, the year of AI🤣 ChatGPT applies to vet school🚀 Quick hits

Maybe you are tired of hearing about artificial intelligence. Maybe you are truly confused as to why it is all of a sudden in the news. Or perhaps you read past editions of Weekend Rounds or listened to Obi co-founder Ryan Appleby on some podcasts and thought "heck ya, I can't wait to see where this technology leads us."However you're feeling about AI, the strides that the technology has made in 2022 is truly remarkable.Let's start with the veterinary applications. If it didn't happen already, 2022 was likely the year you got a cold call offering you AI interpretations for your radiographs. And if you are like everyone else who slid into Ryan's DMs on Twitter you have no idea what to do about it.Is this the saviour you have been looking for or just 21st century snake oil? To help answer that question and educate veterinarians, the journal Veterinary Radiology and Ultrasound has spent the better part of two years, putting together a Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence. The special issue is free to read online and features invited commentaries and reviews from an amazing group of veterinary radiologists, medical physicists and medical doctors. Inside you'll find:

• Information on the underlying technologies

• A review on the literature about AI in veterinary imaging to date

• deep considerations on the ethical impacts of AI.

Perhaps best of all, the issue includes a

breakdown of how to evaluate AI products

you are considering using in your practice. Call us biased, but this issue is a must read before sending your images to an AI service.

Outside of vet med, AI has made even more incredible leaps and bounds. The biggest advancement has been in that of generative AI - a subset of AI technology that can generate new content. The two largest applications have been that in generative

art

and in generative

text

.

Generative Art

Generative AI such as

Dall-E 2

,

Midjourney

and

Stable Diffusion

have produced amazing pieces of artwork. Critics and enthusiasts alike have called the technology a game changer for design and art. You would be forgiven for wondering how and why this affects veterinarians. Imagine you are opening a new clinic and need a logo,

you can create one with AI rather than hire a designer

. Or you can create stock photos for your website with AI generated people that never existed. Maybe your clinic needs new art work. AI can do that for you, just like the piece below.

Perhaps most excitingly, the same technology has the potential to be used to create fake medical images which can then be used in training other AI models or used for teaching.

Generative Text

ChatGPT

is one of the coolest tools on the web (we told you we'd get back to ChatGPT). You can ask it anything and it will generate a response. Like the Christmas list above, or the image below where it told us why it is so hard to be a veterinarian in 2022:

Sure, its not perfect. But it's certainly impressive. The program works by predicting what the next text should be, so issues can pop up since it is effectively making stuff up. It can sound super convincing, but as we can see above, it's not always right.

This is only the first version, and the applications for this kind of technology are endless. Programmers are creating specific versions using GPT-3 the large language model behind Chat-GPT. There are versions which answer science questions like

BioGPT from Microsoft Research

. It is only a matter of time before there are versions to answer questions for veterinarians and pet owners alike.

We decided to have some fun with ChatGPT and decided to ask it a series of theoretical vet school interview questions we pulled from our brains and from Future MD. You be the judge, would you admit the AI to the class of 2027?

Here are some stories we're following this week from around the veterinary world and animal kingdom:

Berlin aquarium containing 1,500 fish explodes [BBC]Will infections continue to surge in 2023? [DVM360]10 States banned testing cosmetics on animals [CNN]How Indigenous philosophies can improve how people treat animals [Phys.org]Kids read to animals at shelter [WRAL]Fear Free medical records [DVM360]

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