Generative Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Ethical Considerations and Assessment Checklist
This addresses ethical challenges in high-stakes healthcare applications of generative AI, but it is incremental as it builds on existing discussions without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the gap between ethical discussions and operational solutions for generative AI in healthcare by conducting a scoping review and proposing an assessment checklist to enhance research transparency and documentation.
The widespread use of ChatGPT and other emerging technology powered by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has drawn much attention to potential ethical issues, especially in high-stakes applications such as healthcare, but ethical discussions are yet to translate into operationalisable solutions. Furthermore, ongoing ethical discussions often neglect other types of GenAI that have been used to synthesise data (e.g., images) for research and practical purposes, which resolved some ethical issues and exposed others. We conduct a scoping review of ethical discussions on GenAI in healthcare to comprehensively analyse gaps in the current research, and further propose to reduce the gaps by developing a checklist for comprehensive assessment and transparent documentation of ethical discussions in GenAI research. The checklist can be readily integrated into the current peer review and publication system to enhance GenAI research, and may be used for ethics-related disclosures for GenAI-powered products, healthcare applications of such products and beyond.