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Experts at the Association of Health Care Journalists Fall Summit said medical students’ use of AI is not inherently cheating and can be taught transparently. They also warned that reliance on AI could weaken clinical reasoning, so training should include work without the technology.
Medical students who use artificial intelligence for assignments are not automatically cheating, experts said at the Association of Health Care Journalists Fall Summit in Los Angeles on October 15. But speakers cautioned that medical schools must teach students to use AI openly while preserving their ability to make clinical judgments without it.
Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez, a computational biomedicine researcher and educator at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said AI use is not the same as plagiarism. In her program, she asks students to show how they construct prompts and review the AI-generated text together, treating the process as part of the assignment rather than concealing it.
Gonzalez-Hernandez argued that trying to catch students secretly using AI can waste effort that could be spent teaching responsible use. She said AI is likely to become part of education and urged instructors to bring it into classroom discussion. Her position does not mean every use is acceptable: she said students need to use the tools properly, and the source report did not describe a universal policy for medical schools.
Speakers also raised the risk that students could lose skills if they depend on AI. Tina Hernandez-Boussard, a Stanford biomedical informatics professor, described residents who struggled to synthesize information and interpret electrocardiograms after arriving at a hospital cardiac ward in Uganda where electricity was unavailable and AI support could not be used. She said trainees still need to be able to make sense of clinical information themselves.
Keeping Clinical Judgment in Training
The debate reaches beyond academic integrity. Medical students are preparing for decisions that affect patients, and educators must weigh whether AI helps them learn or lets them bypass practice that builds independent reasoning. The summit discussion did not establish that AI use causes skill loss, but speakers treated de-skilling as a potential risk that medical programs should address.
Gonzalez-Hernandez also described a possible benefit: AI could help clinicians notice questions they missed and reduce the influence of subjective wording in medical notes. She said language expressing doubt about a patient’s symptoms may vary across demographic groups, and suggested AI could prompt clinicians to ask additional questions. That is a proposed use, not evidence presented at the summit that AI has already corrected such differences or improved patient outcomes.
The practical challenge for schools is to teach students to scrutinize AI output while retaining the capacity to work without it. That balance matters both when technology is available and when it fails, is inaccessible, or cannot be trusted for a particular decision.
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A Classroom Policy Debate
The discussion took place during a session on AI and medical education at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Fall Summit. The speakers addressed two connected questions: whether using AI for coursework is academic misconduct, and whether reliance on the tools could affect the skills doctors need.
Eli Cahan, the session moderator, framed the second question as one of deciding which forms of clinical reasoning doctors must retain. He compared navigation before and after GPS, while cautioning that it remains unclear which reasoning tasks, if any, can safely be delegated to AI. The comparison was a prompt for discussion, not a finding that clinical judgment can be replaced.
Gonzalez-Hernandez said she wants assignments to make AI use visible, including students’ prompts and the resulting text. She and Hernandez-Boussard also supported training that removes technology at times, with Gonzalez-Hernandez suggesting paper-and-pencil exercises. The source report describes their views and examples, not a formal policy adopted by a medical school or professional body.
“I’m withholding judgment until we see whether and what kind of clinical reasoning actually is relevant for doctors to do.”
— Eli Cahan, session moderator
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Evidence and Rules Remain Unsettled
The summit discussion did not provide study results measuring how AI affects medical students’ learning, clinical reasoning, or patient outcomes. The account also does not establish how common AI use is in medical schools or whether institutions have consistent rules on disclosure and permitted use.
It remains unclear which clinical tasks can safely be supported or delegated to AI and how educators should assess students’ independent abilities. Hernandez-Boussard’s Uganda example was an account of residents’ experience, not a controlled study establishing that AI caused a loss of skill. The potential for AI to reduce bias in clinical notes was also presented as an argument, not a demonstrated outcome.
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Schools Face Training Choices
The speakers pointed toward practical steps rather than a single new rule: let students disclose and discuss their AI prompts, teach them to evaluate generated material, and include exercises completed without AI. Gonzalez-Hernandez said educators can create scenarios using paper and pencil so trainees practice synthesizing information independently.
No specific policy changes, implementation dates, or follow-up research were announced in the source report. Medical schools will need to decide how to define acceptable AI assistance and how to test that students retain core clinical skills. Whether these approaches improve learning or patient care remains to be established.
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Key Questions
Did the experts say that using AI in medical school is cheating?
No. Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez said AI is not plagiarism and argued that it can be used in coursework when students do so properly. The discussion did not set a universal rule for every school or assignment.
What classroom approach did Gonzalez-Hernandez describe?
She said she asks students to show how they build prompts, share the resulting paragraph, and work through it together. The aim is to make AI use part of instruction rather than something students conceal.
Why are educators concerned about AI use?
Speakers warned that relying on AI could weaken students’ ability to reason independently or synthesize clinical information. They said trainees should practice without technology as well as learn to use it.
Did the summit show that AI improves medical decisions or reduces bias?
No evidence of improved outcomes was presented in the report. Gonzalez-Hernandez suggested AI might prompt clinicians to ask missed questions or provide a more neutral check, but those benefits were discussed as possibilities.
What remains unknown about AI in medical education?
The discussion did not settle which tasks can safely be delegated to AI, how much use affects clinical skills, or what disclosure rules schools should adopt. Those questions require further evaluation and decisions by medical programs.
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