Human-AI interaction in Healthcare relations. Impacts on trust
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Trust in the Age of AI: Rethinking the Doctor–Patient Relationship
Technology has always been part of medicine. From diagnostic instruments to imaging, it has long stood between the physician’s knowledge and the patient’s body. Yet for most of its history it has been understood as a tool: something that sharpened the clinical gaze without changing the doctor’s place in the relationship of care.
Artificial intelligence seems to mark a break with this paradigm. AI no longer simply extends the physician’s capabilities under their judgement. It increasingly enters the relationship of care as an actor in its own right, often unseen and rarely made explicit to patients. The doctor–patient dyad, long at the heart of clinical and sociological thinking on care, is turning into a triad, with AI shaping both diagnostic processes and, indirectly, the way trust between doctor and patient is built.
Both doctors and patients experience this presence with ambivalence. That ambivalence cannot be separated from wider changes in healthcare: shorter consultations, overstretched professionals, the growing digital mediation of everyday interactions and the erosion of continuity of care. At the same time, media narratives tend to portray the doctor–patient relationship in one of two ways. Some offer a nostalgic image built on asymmetry and reliance. Others tell a techno-optimistic story of transparency and informational parity.
Our research, led by the Research Centre in Digital Humanities at Università Pegaso, starts from this tension between lived experience and media imaginaries. It asks how, and to what extent, trust in the doctor–patient relationship has evolved, or eroded, now that AI has joined the conversation.
The study pursues three aims:
- to explore the synthetic digital imaginaries of doctor–patient trust, as they appear in online media content and in the outputs of generative AI systems;
- to reconstruct how physicians perceive and experience their daily practice, with particular attention to the role of trust and technology;
- to reconstruct how patients perceive and experience healthcare, from routine health management to more complex and significant care pathways.