[Personal View] AI scribe functions in psychiatric practice: clinical oversight, consent, and regulation

Abstract

Ambient artificial intelligence (AI) documentation tools, known as AI scribes, have entered psychiatric clinical practice, bundling at least three operations into a single workflow, without sufficient attention to the differences among them. In this Personal View, we argue that AI-generated clinical narrative (history of present illness), AI-generated clinical observation (mental status examination), and AI-generated diagnostic reasoning (assessment and plan) are functionally distinct operations that stand in qualitatively different relationships to their shared input, with distinct failure modes and oversight demands.