AI in Healthcare Earns Trust or Suspicion One Appointment at a Time

Clinical AI adoption is being decided in real time by patients who are asked to consent without being told what they are consenting to. The physician's office that described ambient transcription software as 'AI' ^[6] did not do so by accident — the label carries a legitimizing weight that 'dictation software' does not. What patients are actually refusing when they decline is not a specific technology but an unspecified substitution, offered without terms. That refusal is a more sophisticated response than the institutions receiving it have yet acknowledged.