Prompt
The instruction or question you give an AI model to get a response. A prompt can be a short request or several paragraphs of context. The model has no goal of its own, it reacts to what it is given, so the wording, the detail, and the framing of the prompt shape the answer you get back. In practice this means two clinicians asking the same model the same clinical question in different words can get meaningfully different answers, which is why how a prompt is written is part of how safely a tool is used.
A resident asks a chat assistant whether pleuritic chest pain after a cold fits viral pericarditis, and gets back a tidy list of the features that fit. Described instead as pleuritic chest pain in a 40-year-old after a cold, with a request for a differential, the same case brings pulmonary embolism and pneumothorax onto the list. When you use one of these tools on a clinical question, give it the findings and ask for the possibilities before naming your own suspicion, because a prompt that names a diagnosis tends to pull the answer toward it.
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