AI World-building and the Medical Humanities

Algorithms form a core part of medical research and practice, from Evidence Based Medicine to triage. How can the medical humanities help us make sense of these new experiences of health and illness? Can a model trained on everyone truly understand and represent an individual's symptoms and experiences? How do AI technologies shape knowledge and care? We tackle these sorts of questions in this one-day symposium featuring a keynote talk from Prof. Ericka Johnson (Linköping University) and panels on Narratives and Identity and Challenging Knowledge Systems.

Throughout this day of talks and panels, we will consider how entanglements of AI and medicine shape emerging categories and infrastructures, and the role which the medical humanities can play within challenging and constructing future directions for medical AI. We will examine different types of AI, from ‘general purpose’ approaches like Large Language Models for mental health to more domain specific ones such as digital epidemiology, and highlight their relationships with practitioners and patients.

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This event is in-person only and free to attend.

If you have any accessibility or dietary requirements, please get in touch with us at imh.events@durham.ac.uk.

This symposium is hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities' AI & Medical Humanities Research Strand, led by Sam Bennett, Alex Campolo, Angela Woods, and Victoria Patton.

Image attribution: Fanny Maurel & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 /