ChatGPT to enhance learning in dental education at a historically black medical college

In dental education of today, the didactic curriculum primarily relies on lecture-based courses, where instructors impart knowledge through presentations and discussions. The recent rise of powerful large language model-based tools, exemplified by ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), poses a great challenge to traditional dental education while simultaneously offering a unique resource and approach that potentially complements today’s teaching and learning, where existing widely available learning resources have often fallen short. In this paper, we used dental course materials, syllabi, and textbooks adopted currently in the School of Dentistry at Meharry Medical College to assess the potential utility and effectiveness of ChatGPT in dental education. We collected the responses of the chatbot to questions as well as students' interactions with it for assessment. Our results showed that ChatGPT can assist in dental essay writing and generate relevant content for dental students, in addition to other benefits. The limitations of ChatGPT were also discussed in the paper.