When the barrier is not intellectual: artificial intelligence, authorship, and academic production in health professions education

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) did not give this author new ideas. It provided the cognitive infrastructure to turn existing ideas into published text. This commentary describes a first-person experience of using AI as a tool for academic production in health professions education. Four examples are presented: redesigning a psychopathology course; producing large-scale assessment material for a clerkship; formalising connections between art and medical teaching; and mapping a research agenda from scattered ideas. The central argument is that the greatest obstacle to many clinician-educators' scholarly contribution is not intellectual but logistical — and that AI, by lowering that barrier, reveals how much of what we call "academic productivity" has always measured infrastructure rather than thought. Predictable objections are addressed directly: the risk of homogenisation, the temptation to accept AI output uncritically, and the particular burden faced by faculty in the Global South who must publish in a language that is not their own. The commentary concludes that AI does not replace authorship but changes its conditions of possibility, and that whether it does so with integrity depends on the judgement and honesty of those who use it.