AI Stories for Healthier Lives: Narrative Paradigms in AI-Augmented Mass Media Health Campaigns

Abstract

Artificial intelligence starts to mediate interpersonal relationships; the present article uses the narrative paradigm suggested by Walter Fisher to question the possibility of AI to co-create health-promotional narratives in the mass media, especially in the form of a public-service announcement (PSA).  The present study approaches the conceptualization of AI as a narrator in order to explore the implications of such augmented narratives on the credibility and believability of public-health communication.  With the help of the modern theoretical criticism, the debate predicts the ethical consequences of human-AI partnership, such as narrative fidelity, amplified bias, and responsibility.  Viewed in the terms of a more narrative rationality, that is, the primacy of coherence and fidelity, this piece of work claims that, although AI can be used to offer greater scalability and personalization, it can also contribute to the loss of the humanistic nature of health stories, thus putting in jeopardy campaigns about crisis-related issues, such as mental-health-stigma reduction, or vaccine-inoculation rates.  The literature review summarizes the background of narrative theory in health communication and AI applications and the methodology is a synthesis conceptual approach that followed and used data provided by Google Scholar, PubMed, and JSTOR through specific queries like narrative paradigm AI health. The case studies of USA, India, and Sri Lanka base their concepts on practice, examining AI-based HIV prevention messaging, transmedia sexual-health chatbots and culturally-sensitive image-based campaigns to reveal contradictions between persuasive efficacy and cultural authenticity.  Finally, the article offers framework ethical suggestions that would make AI-enhanced narratives enhance equal health outcomes.