AI in medical writing: Tool or threat?

How AI is reshaping the industry - and why expert oversight still matters

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant inroads into nearly every sector, and medical writing is no exception. From generating clinical summaries to drafting health blogs and creating medical education materials, AI offers powerful tools that promise efficiency and scalability. But with these advancements comes a pressing question: Is AI a helpful tool for medical writers—or a looming threat to the profession?

Here, we explore how AI is reshaping medical writing, the opportunities it brings, and why human expertise remains not only relevant, but essential.

The rise of AI in medical writing

AI technologies, particularly models like ChatGPT and BioGPT (including those in development and still in limited use, such as Google Med-PaLM), are being increasingly used to support medical content generation. These tools can:

• Speed up literature reviews and evidence synthesis
• Draft summaries of published research
• Translate complex research and/or clinical findings into lay-friendly language

Not surprisingly, medical writers and communication agencies are now integrating AI into their workflows to streamline repetitive tasks and free up time for writers. 

Efficiency gains: The ‘tool’ perspective

From a productivity standpoint, AI can be a game-changer. It can rapidly:

• Identify and summarise relevant literature
• Reformat content to suit different audiences (e.g., for patients, health care professionals, regulators)
• Perform basic proofreading and consistency checks
• Provide multilingual support in global medical communications

These capabilities can enhance turnaround times, reduce costs, and support the scalability of medical writing services, especially in fast-paced sectors like medical affairs, regulatory submissions, and continuing medical education (CME).

In this way, AI acts as a tool - an efficient digital assistant that helps expert writers get more done in less time.

The threat narrative: Accuracy, ethics, and oversight

Despite its capabilities, AI is far from infallible. AI models can generate plausible but incorrect or outdated content—a phenomenon known as “hallucination.” Inaccuracies in medical writing can have serious consequences, from misinforming healthcare professionals to risking patient safety.

Other risks include:

• Lack of transparency: AI models don’t cite sources by default, making it difficult to verify claims.
• Regulatory non-compliance: Medical writing must follow strict formats and approval processes, something AI may not consistently deliver.
• Loss of nuance: AI may miss subtle but critical context, such as tone sensitivity in patient-facing materials or local regulatory variations.

There are also ethical concerns around data privacy, intellectual property, and authorship attribution. These factors make it clear that AI cannot replace the judgment, accountability, and domain expertise of a trained medical writer.

A hybrid future: Augmentation, not replacement

Rather than viewing AI as a threat, many in the field are embracing it as a complementary tool. Medical writing is evolving into a more strategic, quality-assurance-focused discipline, where AI handles routine tasks and humans bring the essential oversight.

Skilled medical writers can:

• Fact-check and refine AI-generated drafts
• Add critical thinking, clinical insight, and regulatory knowledge
• Ensure the content aligns with intended tone, purpose, and audience
• Provide the ethical and professional lens that AI lacks

By combining AI’s speed with human expertise, the medical writing process can become more efficient and more robust. Writing intended to engage with an audience is definitely not a process conducive to exclusive AI control.

Preparing for an AI-enhanced medical writing landscape

To thrive in an AI-enabled future, medical writers should consider:

• Upskilling in AI literacy, by understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI tools.
• Strengthening core expertise, by staying up to date with clinical knowledge, regulatory guidance, and ethical standards.
• Adopting quality-control frameworks, by establishing clear processes for reviewing and validating AI-assisted content.
• Advocating for transparency, by encouraging clear documentation of AI use in collaborative writing environments.

Industry organisations, such as the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) and the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), are beginning to develop guidelines for the ethical and responsible use of AI in medical communication.

The current state of play

Writers of all backgrounds, including medical writers, are using AI to get started on their writing projects. AI is legitimately helping writers to:

• Overcome writer’s block (also known as “blank page syndrome”, when ideas or words won’t flow) by suggesting topics and content for consideration 
• Explore and test ideas for content development, including different points of view
• Experiment with language for different audiences (non-expert, expert, policy analyst, decision makers), including the writer’s tone (the attitude the writer conveys towards a topic)

Conclusion: AI is here to stay but the human edge remains vital

AI is undeniably reshaping the landscape of medical writing. It offers efficiency, consistency, and support for large-scale content needs. But it is not a replacement for trained professionals.

Despite AI strengths, it is the authentic human emotion, intuition and lived experiences of writers that are crucial for adding value and perspective to AI-generated prompts.

AI allows medical writers to focus on those humanistic aspects of writing that connect the writer with the real world - these demand the human skills of strategic, creative and critical thinking, including ethical and social responsibility.

“... no author recognises Microsoft Word and Google Chrome — which are widely-used tools in the production of medical writings — as collaborators to their work, LLMs [language learning models] should similarly not be recognised as co-authors but merely regarded as tools that authors master and deploy in the production of their writings.” (Armitage, 2024).

Ultimately, the value of a medical writer lies not just in generating words - but in ensuring those words are accurate, meaningful, and aligned with medical, regulatory, and ethical standards. In this context, AI is not a threat, but a tool - one that, with expert oversight, can elevate the craft and impact of medical writing.

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Our own stance on AI

At KMG Communications, we blend AI technology with human expertise for high-quality, reliable content.

We only use AI to:

• Overcome writer’s block
• Explore and test ideas for content development, including different points of view
• Experiment with language for different audiences

We do not:

• Use AI to produce final drafts
• Feed sensitive or confidential information into AI 

Our writers actively input to and inform the content that shapes the final product we present to our clients. AI is simply a tool that our writers deploy during the process in the production of their work. 

Rest assured, we keep AI in the assistant’s seat. We never let AI drive our medical writing projects!

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References

Armitage R. 2024. Generative AI in medical writing: Co-author or tool? British Journal of General Practice, 74(740): 126-127. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp24X736605

Doyal AS, Sender D, Nanda M, Serrano RA. 2023. ChatGPT and artificial intelligence in medical writing: Concerns and ethical considerations. Cureus, 10;15(8):e43292. doi: 10.7759/cureus.43292. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10492634/

?Harrer, Stefan. 2023. “Attention is not all you need: The complicated case of ethically using large language models in healthcare and medicine.” eBioMedicine, 90 (April): 104512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2023.104512.

Khalifa M, Albadawy M (2024). Using artificial intelligence in academic writing and research: An essential productivity tool. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine Update, 5: 100145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpbup.2024.100145

Liebrenz M, Schleifer R, Buadze A, Bhugra D, and Smith A. 2023. Generating scholarly content with ChatGPT: Ethical challenges for medical publishing.” The Lancet Digital Health, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/s2589-7500(23)00019-5.

Hazem Z, McMillan J, King M. 2023. “Ethics of generative AI.” Journal of Medical Ethics, 49(2): 79-80. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2023-108909.

Author: Kara Gilbert, KMG Communications