COLOSS B-RAP expert evaluation of beekeeping advice from ChatGPT, part 1

The advanced language model ChatGPT is capable of understanding and generating human-like text. It can be integrated into various services, ranging from customer support to educational platforms, providing personalized assistance, information and guidance. For straightforward, low-complexity medical quest­ions, ChatGPT has been shown to have potential as an AI-assisted decision support tool in medicine (Harskamp & De Clercq, Citation2024). In apiculture, hive management is an important factor in maintaining healthy and productive honey bee colonies (Sperandio et al., Citation2019; Steinhauer et al., Citation2021). Artificial intelligence-based linguistic models could provide an easy-to-access advisory service in countries where no advisory services are available or to relieve advisors. At a workshop of the COLOSS core project B-RAP (Fabricius Kristiansen et al., Citation2022) held in Olomouc, Czechia, in February 2024, we, therefore, tested the ability of ChatGPT3.5 to deal with some common questions in beekeeping. The question formulation always included rough information on location and date and formulated the beekeeping-related problem as a question allowing an open answer. The panel of 13 experts present (researchers, beekeeping advisors, veterinarians), many of them beekeepers themselves, evaluated the answers.