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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Artif. Intell.
Sec. Medicine and Public Health
Volume 6 - 2023 | doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1328865
This article is part of the Research Topic

Digital Health Technologies for Shared Decision Making

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Exploring the Role of AI in Classifying, Analyzing, and Generating Case Reports on Assisted Suicide Cases: Feasibility and Ethical Implications

Giovanni Spitale1 Gerold Schneider2 Federico Germani1 Nikola Biller-Andorno1*
  • 1Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • 2Institute of Computational Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Zurich, Switzerland

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This paper presents a study on the use of AI models for the classification of case reports on assisted suicide procedures. The database of the five Dutch regional bioethics committees was scraped to collect the 72 case reports available in English. We trained several AI models for classification according to the categories defined by the Dutch Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act. We also conducted a related project to fine-tune an OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo large language model for generating new fictional but plausible cases. As AI is increasingly being used for judgement, it is possible to imagine an application in decision-making regarding assisted suicide. Here we explore two arising questions: feasibility and ethics, with the aim of contributing to a critical assessment of the potential role of AI in decision-making in highly sensitive areas.

Keywords: AI, artificial intelligence, Assisted suicide, Euthanasia, Ethics committee, synthetic data, Case classification

Received: 09 Nov 2023; Accepted: 24 Nov 2023.

Copyright: © 2023 Spitale, Schneider, Germani and Biller-Andorno. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Prof. Nikola Biller-Andorno, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland