@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2026-telling,
    title = "Telling Speculative Stories to Help Humans Imagine the Harms of Healthcare {AI}",
    author = "Zhao, Xingmeng  and
      Wang, Tongnian  and
      Schumacher, Dan  and
      Rammouz, Veronica  and
      Rios, Anthony",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.413/",
    pages = "8476--8516",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare, enabling the fast development of tools such as stress monitors, wellness trackers, and mental health chatbots. However, this rapid and low-barrier development can also introduce risks, including bias, privacy violations, and unequal access, especially when systems overlook real-world contexts, diverse user needs, and cultural settings. Many recent approaches use AI to identify such risks automatically, but this can reduce human engagement in understanding how harms arise, who they affect, and which stakeholder needs remain unspoken. We present a human-centered ethical foresight framework that generates speculative user stories and supports multi-agent discussions to help people reflect on potential benefits and harms of healthcare AI before deployment. In a user study, participants who engaged with stories identified a broader range of harms, distributing their responses more evenly across all 17 harm types, whereas those who did not engage with stories focused primarily on privacy and well-being (79.1{\%}). Overall, our findings suggest that storytelling helps people anticipate potential risks and benefits and reflect more broadly on how AI systems may affect different users, contexts, and often unspoken needs."
}