Over the past decade, AI has been used to aid or even replace humans in many professional fields. There are now robots delivering groceries or working in assembling lines in factories, and there are AI assistants scheduling meetings or answering the phone line of customer services. Perhaps even more surprisingly, we have recently started admiring visual art produced by AI, and reading essays and poetry “written” by AI (Miller 2019), that is, composed by imitating or assembling human compositions. Very recently, the development of ChatGPT has shown how AI could have applications in education (Kung et al. 2023) the judicial system (Parikh et al. 2019) and the entertainment industry. 1 One of the most promising areas of development for AI is healthcare (Mishra et al. 2021). AI has been used for a few years to assist in diagnosing patients and find the best treatments (see, for instance, IBM Watson). More recently, AI robots have been used to help surgeons perform brain surgery (Prabu et al. 2014).

AI is quickly becoming effective at performing several tasks in healthcare settings that we used to consider a human prerogative. In particular, AI seems to be better than humans at diagnosing some diseases because it can learn from vast datasets and recognise patterns better than we can (Loh 2018). It is therefore likely that areas of medicine mainly concerned with diagnosing will be integrated with AI sooner than others.