An interdisciplinary project on the topic of ethics and AI is currently being prepared at the University of Rostock. Researchers from medicine, computer science, ethics, interdisciplinary research, and DH aim to jointly explore the role of AI agents in settings of co-medical reasoning (Salloch and Eriksen, 2024, Porsdam Mann et al., 2024) and situatedness (Troqe, Lakemond and Holmberg, 2024). To this end, AI agents are developed and assessed in the area of longevity and dementia studies, focusing on ethical implications.

The DH subproject aims to model and evaluate chat logs for medical consultations as text corpora. Of particular interest is linking the texts with situation-related parameters (e.g., when and where someone used the chat), information about the patients (gender, age, health status), and other protocols of human conversation (between doctor and patient). The aim is to map the collaborative process of consultation, anamnesis, and diagnosis (co-medical reasoning) and the co-situating of AI agents with human participants.

We are currently evaluating whether and to what extent modeling the data in XML-TEI would be useful for the project (using elements for encoding CMC corpora, transcriptions of speech, and the profile description in the TEI header). This is a novel approach in the field of medical and AI research on this topic, but it is promising in view of the desired modeling of co-situatedness. First, fictitious chat logs are created with Chat-GPT on the topic of longevity and counseling, which are used for modeling purposes, as the protection of personal data must be taken into account when using real chats (see examples at https://github.com/hennyu/longevity-chats). The poster presents the current state of preparatory work for the project and invites discussion with the TEI community.