High Schoolers’ Perceptions of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rising technology with endless benefits and applications especially in the field of medicine. Unfortunately, ethical issues such as accountability, privacy, safety, security, and transparency have created a divide between the public and AI. A key population to understand is high school students as they will be affected more and more as AI continues to be developed. This begs the question: What are American high school students’ perceptions of artificial intelligence in medicine? The mixed method approach for this study used a survey aligned with Aggarwal et al. (2021) to gather quantitative results about student opinions on AI. Structure interviews aligned with Amann et al. (2023) were also conducted to find underlying themes between participants’ opinions. There were a total of 153 participants in this study. The students had self-reported low levels of understanding of AI as 44.44% disagreed with the statement that they had knowledge of AI technology in medicine while 30.72% were neutral. Additionally, only 23.53% of students trusted AI which contradicted the fact that students have a great amount of exposure to new technologies. There were significant differences in the levels of knowledge and trust in AI that high school students had in this study. A need for education on AI and its use in medicine as well as other sectors may be beneficial in closing the gap between the public and AI.