Artificial Intelligence and the Purposes of Public Health: A Critical Look at Technology

Within public health, the contemporary discourse surrounding AI in this field is dominated by what this paper terms the "standard approach." In this frame, AI appears as a neutral tool to be evaluated for accuracy, privacy protection, and bias mitigation. When direct benefits outweigh direct harms, AI is described as an opportunity to improve public health practice. But the standard approach does not consider how public health's adoption of AI discloses and reinforces different accounts of the underlying purpose of the profession. Drawing insights from the communitarian thinker Wendell Berry, we demonstrate how AI does not merely improve efficiency and add capabilities but tends to align public health practice with purposes and assumptions that, when actualized, increasingly displace community power and authentic human presence. This tendency is clear in three commonly proposed applications of AI in public health practice: health education, community health assessments, and data analysis. Because the advent of AI offers an opportunity for greater technological efficiency, it offers the public health community the opportunity to reflect on what ultimate ends those efficiencies should be directed toward.