A comparison of ChatGPT-generated articles with human-written articles

ObjectiveChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an artificial intelligence language tool developed by OpenAI that utilises machine learning algorithms to generate text that closely mimics human language. It has recently taken the internet by storm. There have been several concerns regarding the accuracy of documents it generates. This study compares the accuracy and quality of several ChatGPT-generated academic articles with those written by human authors.Material and methodsWe performed a study to assess the accuracy of ChatGPT-generated radiology articles by comparing them with the published or written, and under review articles. These were independently analysed by two fellowship-trained musculoskeletal radiologists and graded from 1 to 5 (1 being bad and inaccurate to 5 being excellent and accurate).ResultsIn total, 4 of the 5 articles written by ChatGPT were significantly inaccurate with fictitious references. One of the papers was well written, with a good introduction and discussion; however, all references were fictitious.ConclusionChatGPT is able to generate coherent research articles, which on initial review may closely resemble authentic articles published by academic researchers. However, all of the articles we assessed were factually inaccurate and had fictitious references. It is worth noting, however, that the articles generated may appear authentic to an untrained reader.