I Couldn't Stop Thinking About the Eye Contact
There's a strange thing happening in clinics right now. Doctors are looking patients in the eye again. Not because the doctors decided to. Because there's an AI in the room, listening to the conversation and writing the notes. Patients say they feel more seen. I keep coming back to that word — seen. It's the same word people use about journaling. And that's where I started getting suspicious of the parallel.
There's a strange thing happening in doctors' offices right now. The doctors are looking patients in the eye again.
Not because anyone told them to. Because there's an AI in the room.
It listens to the whole conversation. It writes the notes. The doctor's hands are off the keyboard, and the doctor's eyes are on the patient. Patients say it feels different. They say they feel more seen.
I keep coming back to that word. Seen.
It's the same word I have heard people use about journaling. About what happens when you sit down with a hard day and write it out. People say they understood themselves better. They say they felt seen — by themselves, by the page, by something. Nobody really specifies by whom. But the word is the same.
That parallel is what I have been chewing on for the last week. Because on the surface, the two situations look completely different. A doctor's office is a clinical space. A journal is a private one. A patient is a patient. A journaler is just a person at the end of the day.
But underneath the surface, both situations have a scribe. In the clinic, the scribe is the AI. In the journal, the scribe is the writer.
And here is the thing that has been bothering me.
In the clinic, putting a scribe in the room seems to free up the human relationship. The doctor can be more present. The patient feels heard. Everybody seems better off.
So if a scribe in the room is good for medicine — and the act of being your own scribe is supposedly good for the soul — then why does the idea of letting an AI write my journal entries feel wrong to me?
That is the question this whole article is going to sit with. I do not have a clean answer. I have a hunch, and a few studies, and the slow feeling that something interesting is hiding inside the difference.
This kind of technology is moving very fast. AI scribes have only been in clinics for about five years. They started rough and got useful very quickly, and now they are in offices everywhere. The shift from pilot project to standard tool happened in a blink.
It is moving so fast that I want to slow down for a minute and ask the obvious question. The one nobody seems to be asking out loud.
If having a scribe in the room makes the conversation better, what is the scribe actually doing?
Because the answer to that question is going to tell me something about my own writing too.
References
1. Diaz N. From pilot to priority: the rise of ambient AI scribes in healthcare. Becker's Health IT. April 16, 2025. Accessed May 2026. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ai/from-pilot-to-priority-the-rise-of-ambient-ai-scribes-in-healthcare/
2. Angus DC, O'Connor MB. AI scribes are here, but is health care ready? A healthy dialogue with Vincent X. Liu. JAMA. Published online May 6, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.5859
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