AI vs Poetry in Medicine

Abstract

The poem “After the Diagnosis” envisions the massive impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on medicine. Its title suggests when the greatest challenges posed by AI truly begin: after its vast “knowledge” and speedy data processing have already superseded clinicians’ diagnostic abilities, but human context is still needed. Subtle allusions to poems by John Donne and Algernon Charles Swinburne, perhaps warehoused somewhere in the AI’s training on texts it has digested but cannot read, preserve human perspective for the reader; more explicitly, the speaker ironically references the popular film Her in reflecting upon how “to forget our troubles” and heal. The AI in the film, with whom its protagonist falls in love, soon forsakes him, a comment on both human frailty (why seek relief from such follies as art and love) and the danger of inhumanity (the compassionless AI finally disregards him as “only a fleshly body”). Other aspects of clinical care that cannot be replicated by AI are implied in the poem’s brilliant final stanza. The physical “body [that] rots and leaks,” which the speaker humorously does not disavow, cries out for physical examination. Similarly unappreciable by AI is wisdom: the speaker implores “when you find these letters/(whoever you are),” supposing AI will not heal humanity in the end but eliminate us, “remember that…we were slated for poppied sleep—/taken from books and friends.” Poetry then becomes indispensable not only to assert the enduring power of the human imagination, but also, in a profession transformed by AI, to remind clinicians that the human in healing is irreplaceable.