Humanizing Medicine in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Challenges, Transformations, and Prospects for Medical Humanities

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping clinical knowledge, workflow, and relationships, and it is doing so at a pace that presses the medical humanities to reinterpret their aims and methods. This article argues that, far from being peripheral to the algorithmic turn, the medical humanities are central to judging when, how, and under what conditions AI supports humane care. Drawing on scholarship from bioethics, science and technology studies, narrative medicine, and health services research, I first situate AI’s rise within long-standing debates about evidence, expertise, and the moral foundations of medicine. I then develop a critical analysis of the principal challenges AI poses for the human dimensions of care, including opacity and accountability, bias and justice, privacy and consent, erosion of clinical judgment and identity, and the risk of substituting datafication for meaning. In a parallel analysis, I identify opportunities where medical humanities can shape AI toward more trustworthy, equitable, and relationally sensitive practices: augmenting empathy and narrative attention with computational tools, reframing explainability as a communicative achievement rather than a technical property alone, embedding participatory design with patients and communities, renovating curricula to integrate critical data literacy with humanistic formation, and aligning governance with values such as dignity and solidarity. The article concludes by proposing a practical research and policy agenda in which humanities scholars collaborate with clinicians, patients, and engineers to evaluate AI not only by its predictive or operational performance but also by its contributions to understanding, moral repair, and shared decision-making in the everyday clinic.

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