Shaping the Future of Generative AI in Aged and Community Care: A Practitioners’ Perspective

We present a qualitative study that examines how aged and community care professionals conceptualise generative AI applications, with particular attention to issues of agency, ethics, and emergent practices and behaviours. There is a growing body of research describing individual AI applications, their effectiveness and ethical implications. However, multiple applications of AI could more radically distort service boundaries and change provider practices for collaborative human-AI teams. Little is known about practitioners’ desired future roles and values for human-AI implementations and possible service innovations. Changes driven by care providers, AI service providers and government policies will have significant implications for complex settings such as aged care and community care. Through seven focus groups employing multiple qualitative methods, we identify coherence and gaps between theoretical and practitioner perspectives on the uses and implications of generative AI. Our findings suggest an urgent need for education and research to bridge theory and practical understanding of generative AI in aged and community care settings and policies to ensure marginalised groups are not locked out of future care services and models.