Beyond Cultural Pastiche: Developing CritIC in AI-mediated Clinical Communication
Event Description
2026 MIC Symposium on Multilingualism | Featured Talk
Beyond Cultural Pastiche: Developing CritIC in AI-mediated Clinical Communication
Abstract: Health professional education is taking diversity and cultural sensitivity seriously, and rightly so. As future clinicians work with diverse patients, educators are seeking meaningful, scalable opportunities for communication training. AI-facilitated simulation appears to offer one solution, with avatar patients generated with recognisable cultural cues. Yet this raises an unsettling question: how does AI reproduce culture and what impact does it have on health trainees? Through analysing multimodal clinical communication data from human-AI and human-human interactions, this talk explores fundamental differences in how AI and humans evoke culture. AI-generated cultural talk resembles a pastiche of essentialist cues that flatten context, diminish human criticality, and reproduce structural inequalities. Human cultural talk, by contrast, creates context, expands imagination, and subverts pre-existing boundaries. I conclude by arguing that the next generation of health professionals needs not only EDI awareness but also Critical AI Literacy, conceptualised as CritIC (Critical Interactional Competence), in AI-facilitated clinical communication.
Speaker: David Wei Dai is Associate Professor in Professional Communication at University College London. His research examines social interaction across healthcare education, intercultural and professional communication, language learning and assessment, and human-AI engagement. His work has appeared in leading venues across applied linguistics, health education, and learning analytics, including Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Medical Education, Advances in Health Sciences Education, BMC Medical Education, and the LAK26 Proceedings. He is the author of the open-access monograph Assessing Interactional Competence. His research has been funded by the British Academy, Leverhulme, the British Council, OET, Duolingo, and TOEFL.
Faculty Response Panel:
Location: Humanities 1006
Beyond Cultural Pastiche: Developing CritIC in AI-mediated Clinical Communication
Abstract: Health professional education is taking diversity and cultural sensitivity seriously, and rightly so. As future clinicians work with diverse patients, educators are seeking meaningful, scalable opportunities for communication training. AI-facilitated simulation appears to offer one solution, with avatar patients generated with recognisable cultural cues. Yet this raises an unsettling question: how does AI reproduce culture and what impact does it have on health trainees? Through analysing multimodal clinical communication data from human-AI and human-human interactions, this talk explores fundamental differences in how AI and humans evoke culture. AI-generated cultural talk resembles a pastiche of essentialist cues that flatten context, diminish human criticality, and reproduce structural inequalities. Human cultural talk, by contrast, creates context, expands imagination, and subverts pre-existing boundaries. I conclude by arguing that the next generation of health professionals needs not only EDI awareness but also Critical AI Literacy, conceptualised as CritIC (Critical Interactional Competence), in AI-facilitated clinical communication.
Speaker: David Wei Dai is Associate Professor in Professional Communication at University College London. His research examines social interaction across healthcare education, intercultural and professional communication, language learning and assessment, and human-AI engagement. His work has appeared in leading venues across applied linguistics, health education, and learning analytics, including Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Medical Education, Advances in Health Sciences Education, BMC Medical Education, and the LAK26 Proceedings. He is the author of the open-access monograph Assessing Interactional Competence. His research has been funded by the British Academy, Leverhulme, the British Council, OET, Duolingo, and TOEFL.
Faculty Response Panel:
- Yi Wang (Panel Chair; Assistant Professor, Asian and Asian American Studies)
- Renee Fabus (Chair and Program Director, Speech-Language Pathology)
- Andrew Flescher (Professor, English and Program in Public Health)
- Ben Zhang (Assistant Professor, Technology, AI and Society)
Location: Humanities 1006
