Abstract
One of the sectors for which Artificial Intelligence applications have been considered as exceptionally promising is the healthcare sector. As a public-facing sector, the introduction of AI applications has been subject to extended news coverage. This article conducts a quantitative and qualitative data analysis of English news media articles covering AI systems that allow the automation of tasks that so far needed to be done by a medical expert such as a doctor or a nurse thereby redistributing their agency. We investigated in this article one particular framing of AI systems and their agency: the framing that positions AI systems as (1a) replacing and (1b) outperforming the human medical expert, and in which (2) AI systems are personified and/or addressed as a person. The analysis of our data set consisting of 365 articles written between the years 1980 and 2019 will show that there is a tendency to present AI systems as outperforming human expertise. These findings are important given the central role of news coverage in explaining AI and given the fact that the popular frame of ‘outperforming’ might place AI systems above critique and concern including the Hippocratic oath. Our data also showed that the addressing of an AI system as a person is a trend that has been advanced only recently and is a new development in the public discourse about AI.
Highlights
Methods such as deep learning, which take advantage of large data sets, have allowed Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to profoundly advance, after they gained momentum in 2012 with a paper specifying a new approach (Krizhevsky et al 2012)
We found that a significant example of the early coverage of the artificial intelligence and medicine topic is represented by the article ‘Expert-System Software Finds Place in Daily Office Routines’ (Miller 1984)
The title literally suggests that artificial intelligence systems in medicine are human-like as they are having a ‘brain’ and presents the computer program in the role of a doctor diagnosing patients: A computer program outperformed doctors in accurately diagnosing patients with heart attacks in an experiment involving 331 patients complaining of chest pains at a San Diego hospital emergency room (Waldholz 1991)
Summary
Methods such as deep learning, which take advantage of large data sets, have allowed AI systems to profoundly advance, after they gained momentum in 2012 with a paper specifying a new approach (Krizhevsky et al 2012). A wide range of different AI systems that process images, as well as language, have been implemented to deliver assisting tasks, and reports agree that those systems are projected to impact societies and economies profoundly (Perrault et al 2019; Crawford et al 2019). AI systems applied in this sector automate tasks which so far needed to be done by a medical expert such as a doctor or a nurse, and when AI systems take on these tasks, aspects of agency are being redistributed. While the redistribution of agency can be framed in different ways, it is one particular framing of AI systems, whose configuration will ground our research inquiry in this article: a framing that positions AI systems as (1a) replacing and (1b) outperforming the human medical expert, and in which (2) AI systems are personified and/or addressed as a person. We will examine in parts the English language discourse that explains the arrival of AI systems in healthcare to a general public and analyse to what extent the points 1a, 1b, and 2 are being used in this explanation
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