In summer 2026, the Critical Anatomies Lab invited graduate students, faculty, and staff from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to participate in a series of interdisciplinary dialogues to explore the intersections of artificial intelligence and community health.
Participants represented 14 departments and multiple colleges and campus affiliations, including disciplines like Geography & Geographic Information Science, Social Work, Health and Kinesiology, Community Health, Speech & Hearing Science, Communication, Anthropology, American Indian Studies, Informatics, Bioengineering, Medicine, Fine and Applied Arts, and research centers like the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute and the Center for Prevention Research and Development.
Students, faculty, and staff articulated interests that, in different ways, converged around questions of how AI is reshaping relationships of care both with medical institutions and with our own bodies. Faculty shared their research on access to care, stigma, communication and information management, and support for family caregivers.
The dialogues were intended to share preliminary research on AI & Community Health advanced in the lab and, from different disciplinary perspectives, identify questions that might be generative to pursue through community-engaged scholarship.
To begin with, we discussed issues of surveillance and trust in relation to Community Health Workers through the implementation of Electronic Verification Systems (EVV), the precarization of care labor through gig economy platforms, the role of birth workers in protecting birthing people’s data, and the rise of ChatGPT health and other generative AI systems within an increasingly commodified health landscape.
Health and media literacy were two salient topics in the conversations. We discussed the nature and usefulness of health advice, and how technologies increasingly mediate people’s interpretations of health information and of their own bodily signals, in turn transforming relationships with doctors and other health professionals. We explored issues of language, the anthropomorphic qualities of chatbots, their tendency to over-agree with users, and the ways these characteristics may influence perceptions of authority and credibility.
These concerns led to a discussion about structural inequality. We talked about how over-relying on AI for health can make existing gaps in care provision less visible by providing technological substitutes for forms of care that people still cannot adequately access. Rather than resolving these inequalities, chatbots normalize them. This concern intersects with questions about increased social isolation and the degradation of our social fabric for community well-being.
We also explored a counterpoint about community-owned infrastructures. We discussed the possibility of smaller, custom-built systems designed around the needs of particular communities, with greater community control over how data is collected, managed, and used. This opened questions about technological sovereignty, but also about the material conditions that make these infrastructures possible. If community-owned systems still depend upon substantial energy consumption, then questions of ownership and control necessarily intersect with questions of environmental impact.
