Brains and bots: How AI is shaping medical education

With artificial intelligence (AI) taking the world by storm in the last year or so, what could this mean for veterinary education? In this episode of Vet Watch, our host Christopher Lee, DVM, MPH, DACVPM, sits down with Pedro Diniz, DVM, PhD, to talk about what the future of veterinary education can look like, for both students and educators.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity.

Christopher Lee, DVM, MPH, DACVPM: So you've definitely helped shape the education and future of DVMs, and now you're working across disciplines, with MDs and with AI in the mix. What's changed? What has AI done to improve education? And why should we be excited about it?

Pedro Diniz, DVM, PhD: So that's a great question, because education tends to move slowly, but AI has brought new paradigm shifts that are forcing educators to think faster and in having to ask difficult questions about their own courses. So for example, AI now is capable of turning and helping educators design their courses, or helping educators create better test items for exam questions, making sure these questions are fair, making sure these questions are aligned with the objectives of the course. So we've seen AI around us, and we will see more and more as the technology continues to evolve. It's fascinating what it can do as outcomes assessment and an analyst. It's incredible what we can do with data sets and analyzing the data and finding caveats.

So what we are seeing today is that arms race on AI from the main platforms available online. So for example, while ChatGPT was the first large model that was very popular 2 and a half years ago, Google has launched Gemini and also notebook LM and Meta has released the llama models, which are actually free models, and other vendors also being in this arms race. We have models now coming from other countries, like China as well. So it is quite interesting to see how fast the technology has evolved because of competition. It is actually hard to catch up on how fast the technology is advancing and how much knowledge is acquiring, how much memory is retaining, and especially [in] veterinary medicine, we have seen...significant increase in the quality of these models in these last 6 months.

Lee: So this arms race, or capitalism, is actually improving things by making everything go faster and from different angles.

Diniz: Yeah, let's be very clear that we this. All these companies are trying to provide what is the best model, so everybody will use them. But then, in reality, I think for education, we have a unique opportunity to use these tools for the benefit of our students and for the learning and in preparing the next generation of veterinarians.