ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1659980
Contesting the Future of AI in Global Health: Narratives of Artificial Intelligence in the World Health Organization's Foresight Exercises
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institutet for Framtidsstudier, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2AI Policy Lab, Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
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The article examines the World Health Organization's (WHO) discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) in their foresight exercises, doing so by drawing on the analytical framework of strong and weak AI narratives. The analysis finds that strong AI narratives (those which depict AI as human-like or even super-intelligent, emphasising existential risks and transformative power) are rarely found. In contrast, the exercises produce a broad range of weak AI narratives (those that emphasise the technical limitations, ethical concerns, and practical governance of specific AI applications in healthcare). The findings reveal how certain AI technologies are foregrounded by WHO, how these are framed as in isolation from other emerging technologies, how this isolation is strategically blurred, and the role of expert participation in legitimising WHO's policy on AI. Situated within WHO's broader policy discourse on AI, the paper draws out how the foresight exercises strategically construct and validate particular trajectories aligned with WHO's existing priorities. Through selective narrative framing, expert input, and methodological design, WHO reinforces its epistemic authority by guiding the global discourse on AI in healthcare toward context-sensitive and manageable use cases of the technology. Ultimately, these foresight exercises serve as a site of contestation, where competing visions of AI in global health are negotiated, and WHO's influence over future governance in the area is actively shaped.
Keywords: World Health Organization, artificial intelligence, AI, narratives, global health, policy discourse, Foresight, Futures
Received: 04 Jul 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tucker. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jason Tucker, jason.tucker@iffs.se
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