Artificial Intelligence for Informed Consent: Helpful Tool or Premature Proxy for Clinical Communication?

We read the article by Chilkoti et al. with great interest.Their work comparing ChatGPT and Google Gemini for generating tracheostomy informed consent documents engages a timely and necessary discussion in Indian critical care practice. 1 As artificial intelligence (AI) tools increasingly permeate healthcare, it becomes essential to distinguish between technological capacity and clinical responsibility.The authors demonstrate that both chatbots produced consent content with broadly similar accuracy, while ChatGPT offered greater readability.Readability is far more than a linguistic feature-it directly affects comprehension, emotional processing, autonomy, and patient confidence.In the intensive care unit (ICU), where decisions are often made under distress and time pressure, communication clarity may profoundly shape relationships and trust.Early research has shown that AI-assisted content often aligns more closely with patient reading-level expectations than traditional medical text. 2 However, two points merit further reflection: