The Clinicians’ Guide to Large Language Models: A General Perspective With a Focus on Hallucinations

Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence tools that have the prospect of profoundly changing how we practice all aspects of medicine. Considering the incredible potential of LLMs in medicine and the interest of many health care stakeholders for implementation into routine practice, it is therefore essential that clinicians be aware of the basic risks associated with the use of these models. Namely, a significant risk associated with the use of LLMs is their potential to create hallucinations. Hallucinations (false information) generated by LLMs arise from a multitude of causes, including both factors related to the training dataset as well as their auto-regressive nature. The implications for…