In this article
I Couldn't Stop Thinking About the Eye Contact
There's a strange thing happening in clinics right now. Doctors are looking patients in the eye again. Not because the doctors decided to. Because there's an AI in the room, listening to the conversation and writing the notes. Patients say they feel more seen. I keep coming back to that word — seen. It's the same word people use about journaling. And that's where I started getting suspicious of the parallel.
There's a strange thing happening in doctors' offices right now. The doctors are looking patients in the eye again.
Not because anyone told them to. Because there's an AI in the room.
It listens to the whole conversation. It writes the notes. The doctor's hands are off the keyboard, and the doctor's eyes are on the patient. Patients say it feels different. They say they feel more seen.
I keep coming back to that word. Seen.
It's the same word I have heard people use about journaling. About what happens when you sit down with a hard day and write it out. People say they understood themselves better. They say they felt seen — by themselves, by the page, by something. Nobody really specifies by whom. But the word is the same.
That parallel is what I have been chewing on for the last week. Because on the surface, the two situations look completely different. A doctor's office is a clinical space. A journal is a private one. A patient is a patient. A journaler is just a person at the end of the day.
But underneath the surface, both situations have a scribe. In the clinic, the scribe is the AI. In the journal, the scribe is the writer.
And here is the thing that has been bothering me.
In the clinic, putting a scribe in the room seems to free up the human relationship. The doctor can be more present. The patient feels heard. Everybody seems better off.
So if a scribe in the room is good for medicine — and the act of being your own scribe is supposedly good for the soul — then why does the idea of letting an AI write my journal entries feel wrong to me?
That is the question this whole article is going to sit with. I do not have a clean answer. I have a hunch, and a few studies, and the slow feeling that something interesting is hiding inside the difference.
This kind of technology is moving very fast. AI scribes have only been in clinics for about five years. They started rough and got useful very quickly, and now they are in offices everywhere. The shift from pilot project to standard tool happened in a blink.
It is moving so fast that I want to slow down for a minute and ask the obvious question. The one nobody seems to be asking out loud.
If having a scribe in the room makes the conversation better, what is the scribe actually doing?
Because the answer to that question is going to tell me something about my own writing too.
References
1. Diaz N. From pilot to priority: the rise of ambient AI scribes in healthcare. Becker's Health IT. April 16, 2025. Accessed May 2026. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ai/from-pilot-to-priority-the-rise-of-ambient-ai-scribes-in-healthcare/
2. Angus DC, O'Connor MB. AI scribes are here, but is health care ready? A healthy dialogue with Vincent X. Liu. JAMA. Published online May 6, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.5859
What I Will Let AI Do for My Writing — and What I Won't
The clinic study had a hidden lesson. The AI helped not by replacing clinical thinking but by clearing the friction around it. The doctor's eyes came up because the keyboard work went down. That is the only frame that makes sense to me for AI in journaling too. AI can help me show up — a prompt, a place to start, a small structure. It cannot do the looking inward for me. That part has to stay mine. So here is what I am going to try.
Here is where I have landed, after a week of thinking about this.
The clinic study had a quiet lesson buried inside it. The AI scribe did not help by being a better doctor. It helped by clearing the friction around the doctor's actual work. The keyboard went away. The eyes came up. The thinking and the caring stayed exactly where they always were — in the doctor.
That is the only frame that makes sense to me for AI in writing.
There is a real version of this and there is a fake version, and I think the difference is what I have been trying to put into words for the last four chapters.
The fake version is letting AI write the journal for me. Hey, here is what I did today. Make it sound thoughtful. That is not journaling. That is having a journal-shaped object on my phone. The artifact without the medicine. The doctor with the AI scribe who never bothered to use it — but worse, because at least that doctor was still doing the doctoring. In the fake version, nobody is doing the writing.
The real version is letting AI clear the friction around the writing. There are honestly a lot of these.
Where AI helps me show up
A prompt I would not have come up with on my own. A starting line on a day when my mind is empty. A short structure for a kind of reflection I have not done before — gratitude, or processing a hard conversation, or thinking about a goal. These are things that lower the activation cost of opening the app at all. The doctor's keyboard. Not the doctor's thinking.
This is roughly what a good writing-habit tool should do. Make it easier to start. Then get out of the way.
In Hurroz, Daily5 lives exactly here. Five minutes. A prompt that gives me somewhere to begin. The tool does the part that's hard to do alone — show up, sit down, know where to start. The writing itself is mine. Nobody is summarizing my day for me.
Sol is a slightly different shape. Sol is reflective journaling with an AI that responds after I have written. Not before. Not instead. After. It is a thinking partner who reads what I wrote and asks me a question I would not have thought to ask myself. That is closer to talking to a thoughtful friend than to having a scribe in the room. The writing was still mine. The reflection on the writing got an extra pair of eyes.
What I will not do — and I think I am going to be careful about this — is hand the writing itself over to AI. Not the first draft. Not the summary of my week. Not the here is what I noticed about myself. That part is the medicine. If I outsource it, I get a better-looking artifact and a quieter inner life.
I want to say one more thing before I stop.
The clinic technology is moving fast. The AI in the doctor's office started as a notetaker. It is becoming a suggester, a drafter, something close to a digital colleague. The line between helps you think and thinks for you is going to keep blurring.
The same line is going to blur for writing tools. It already is. Every journaling app on the App Store right now is being asked: how much AI is too much? Most of them are answering by adding more.
I do not have a confident answer for them. I just have my own answer for me. The medicine is in the doing. So I will use the tools that get me to the doing. And I will be careful with the tools that try to do it for me.
If you are reading this and any of it resonates, please remember that this is not therapeutic guidance. It is a reflection on research, written from outside the clinic looking in. If burnout, depression, anxiety, or any persistent emotional pain is something you recognize in yourself, especially if it is severe or persistent, the people qualified to help with it are mental health professionals. A journal is a wonderful thing. It is not a substitute for care.
Thanks for sitting with this one. I am still thinking about the eye contact.
References
1. Tierney AA, Lee K, Liu VX. Ambient AI scribes and the quintuple aim: what is counted — and what matters. JAMA. Published online April 1, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.3529
2. Angus DC, Khera R, Lieu T, et al; JAMA Summit on AI. AI, health, and health care today and tomorrow: the JAMA Summit Report on Artificial Intelligence. JAMA. 2025;334(18):1650-1664. doi:10.1001/jama.2025.18490
3. Pennebaker JW, Smyth JM. Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. 3rd ed. Guilford Press; 2016.
More by Sulabh Rastogi
