Artificial intelligence (AI) technology, encompassing machine learning and deep learning models, operates through algorithms that enable systems to automatically learn from historical data and make predictions or decisions. This technology is not new to health care. It has now evolved into a more revolutionary form of AI: generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

GenAI algorithms learn from vast datasets to generate synthetic data or new content in a variety of formats. GenAI, especially those relying on the large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 that was introduced in March 2023, employs a technique called tokenization for natural language processing (NLP) of data, whereby sequences of tokens are analyzed instead of entire sentences or paragraphs. This allows the LLMs to efficiently train on and analyze massive volumes of data to generate human-like text.