Artificial intelligence: the future might already be here

A PubMed search using “artificial intelligence” as the search term identified almost 73,000 distinct manuscripts between 2000 and 2017.1 From 2018 to present day, a similar search yielded over 107,000 hits, and >30% of these manuscripts have been published just since January 2022.1 Over the last 2 years, Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology, Oral Radiology has published several manuscripts on the potential use of AI, particularly machine learning, in radiologic interpretation and in diagnostic oral pathology. An editorial was recently published in Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology, Oral Pathology focused on the potential role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the diagnosis of oral mucosal lesions and/or oral cancer.2 The future is fast approaching and, with the recent release of open-source AI software, ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA),3 some might argue it is already here.