By Jamie Brown

Nurses have been the most trusted profession in the U.S. for 24 years running, and with good reason: We care about you, we fight for you, and we don’t lie.

We can’t say the same about those who attack our nurses union for protesting the artificial intelligence data company Palantir. It is no secret that Palantir helps federal agents target immigrants for deportation, helps the Israeli government kill Palestinians in Gaza, and helps our employers maximize profits by analyzing massive amounts of health care data.

The author presents a puppies-and-rainbows view of artificial intelligence deployed in any number of industries, including health care. But he is not a working bedside nurse. He is not a longshoreman. He is not a civil servant. He has no direct on-the-job experience with these products. 

When you talk to people like us, the ones actually doing the real work that keeps our country running day in and day out, you will learn that AI is always for the benefit of the corporation’s profits, never to help us in our jobs. In our industry, hospitals have introduced AI to displace and replace nurses, to dangerously short-staff our shifts, to deny patients care, or to maximize billing — not to support our mission to save patients’ lives. 

At Montefiore hospital in New York City, management in July laid off 12 veteran registered nurses who review patient charts and deal with insurance companies over coverage problems. It replaced them with A.I.-powered software. 

At HCA hospitals across the country, the largest for-profit chain in the U.S., nurses are compelled to download and use a scheduler app called Timpani, a Palantir product. Timpani has wreaked havoc with their calendars and — no surprise — invariably fails to schedule enough experienced nurses on any given shift for the number and severity of patients.

Almost half of U.S. hospitals are using the electronic health record platform EPIC, which recently announced it had integrated ChatGPT into its system. Our nurses have already documented a whole host of systemic, unresolved problems with EPIC and fear that feeding patients’ personal medical data into ChatGPT is not only a gross violation of our privacy, but is just flat-out unsafe.

The companies boast that the system can generate automated end-of-shift hand-off reports that eliminate the need to talk to each other about patients. But any good RN knows that getting a verbal update on a patient from the previous nurse can mean the difference between life and death. 

So don’t fall for people selling you a utopian view of AI. Nurses are not against technology, but we know the difference between technology that helps us take better care of you and technology that kills you.

All of the AI technology our employers are rolling out in our workplaces is untested, unproven, unregulated,  and ultimately benefits their profit margin, not you or us. AI companies are essentially using patients and nurses as guinea pigs. We say no way. Trust nurses, not AI.

Jamie Brown, RN, is president of National Nurses United.