Selling Sickness or Helping Patients in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Background/Objectives: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into dental diagnostics, promising improved detection, efficiency, and patient communication. While these developments offer potential clinical benefits, emerging commercial applications raise important ethical concerns. This study explores how providers of diagnostic AI systems frame their technologies in marketing materials, with particular attention to features designed to influence patient acceptance and increase revenue. Methods: An exploratory qualitative thematic analysis of publicly available promotional content from leading dental AI companies between September and October 2025. Materials were analyzed for recurring rhetorical strategies related to commercialization, persuasion, technological authority, and representations of objectivity. Ethical interpretation was guided by principlism, standard codes in professional ethics, and virtue-based perspectives. Results: AI is frequently marketed not only as a diagnostic aid but also as a tool for boosting case acceptance, return on investment, and practice growth. Visualizations and performance metrics are used rhetorically to position AI as authoritative and objective, encouraging patient compliance while downplaying uncertainty and potential harms. These practices risk undermining patient autonomy, promoting diagnostic inflation and overtreatment, and compromising professional integrity by shifting attention from patient welfare toward commercial outcomes. Conclusion: Pervasive marketing of persuasive diagnostic AI amplifies existing tensions between professional obligations and commercial incentives in dentistry. Without appropriate safeguards, AI risks reinforcing a transactional model of care in which patients are treated as consumers and diagnostics become instruments of persuasion. To preserve trust and ethical practice, dentists and professional organizations must ensure that AI remains a supportive clinical tool rather than a commercial device, prioritizing transparency, informed consent, and patient-centered care.