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NEW YORK — A fourth-year medical student, a music therapist, a child psychiatrist, and a physician-researcher stared at their laptops, puzzling over the combination of words that would make a supposedly intelligent system — NYU Langone’s customized version of ChatGPT — think about health care problems in a way that was useful to them.

As part of a “prompt-a-thon” in August at the medical center’s science building, the group had been charged with analyzing a patient record around the theme of equity using NYU’s HIPAA-compliant implementation of the buzzy OpenAI technology that can interpret language and generate text based on queries.

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After a morning of mini-lectures, participants broke off into assigned groups and dove into NYU Langone’s newly launched prompting interface. Representatives from Microsoft, which makes the artificial intelligence tool accessible through its cloud services, were on hand to ensure everything ran smoothly as about 70 workshop participants from across the academic medical center put prompts into the system around themes including research, clinical applications, and patient education.

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