Exploring the awareness, perceptions, and beliefs towards artificial intelligence chatbots and ChatGPT among academicians and students in Saudi Arabia: a cross-sectional study

Purpose: To determine the awareness, perceptions and beliefs of healthcare academicians and students towards ChatGPT and other similar artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted over a period of four months in 2024 and involved healthcare students and academicians in Saudi Arabia. To examine respondents' awareness, attitudes and beliefs about ChatGPT, a standardized pre-validated questionnaire was administered. Results: Three hundred and ninety-two healthcare students completed the survey. Among the surveyed respondents, 350 (89.3 %) were students and 26 (6.6 %) were assistant professors. More than half of the respondents claimed that they were familiar with computer skills while 174 (44.4 %) were familiar with the term "ChatGPT". Among respondents, 70.7 % believed ChatGPT would increase productivity and 69.4 % thought it could positively influence education. In addition, almost two-thirds of them were comfortable using ChatGPT in healthcare practice. Most (71.2 %) of the respondents revealed that ChatGPT is deemed untrustworthy while 83.4 % expressed concern about the model's potential to provide inaccurate or harmful recommendations. Conclusion: This study shows varying levels of awareness of ChatGPT among respondents. Furthermore, about half of the respondents using ChatGPT show positive beliefs and agree that language models would increase productivity and positively influence education.