@inproceedings{ayadi-2026-clinical,
    title = "The Clinical Fingerprint: Comparing the Rhetorical Integrity and Epistemic Safety of Human Physicians and Large Language Models",
    author = "Ayadi, Bayram",
    editor = "Baez Santamaria, Selene  and
      Somayajula, Sai Ashish  and
      Yamaguchi, Atsuki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-srw.30/",
    pages = "416--425",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-383-8",
    abstract = "While Large Language Models demonstrate expert proficiency on medical benchmarks, the clinical encounter requires more than factual retrieval. It demands a sophisticated rhetorical performance of care that balances authority with epistemic humility. This paper investigates the Clinical Fingerprint by comparing the structural and ethical integrity of advice generated by human physicians and various language models.Our findings reveal a fundamental divergence in how clinical information is prioritized and delivered. We show that whereas physicians utilize efficient, action-oriented structures to provide clear guidance, generic models often bury critical advice under layers of complex linguistic recursion. This creates a significant cognitive load for patients and risks a dangerous safety cliff where models adopt an unearned authoritative tone. Such models frequently mimic the confidence of a doctor while providing contradictory advice, particularly in complex cases involving multiple symptoms. By identifying these rhetorical gaps, our work emphasizes that domain-specific fine-tuning is an ethical necessity to ensure that AI assistants maintain the necessary humility and logical cohesion required for safe medical practice."
}