  Recently, consumer-facing health technologies such as Artificial Intelligence
(AI)-based symptom checkers (AISCs) have sprung up in everyday healthcare
practice. AISCs solicit symptom information from users and provide medical
suggestions and possible diagnoses, a responsibility that people usually
entrust with real-person authorities such as physicians and expert patients.
Thus, the advent of AISCs begs a question of whether and how they transform the
notion of medical authority in everyday healthcare practice. To answer this
question, we conducted an interview study with thirty AISC users. We found that
users assess the medical authority of AISCs using various factors including
automated decisions and interaction design patterns of AISC apps, associations
with established medical authorities like hospitals, and comparisons with other
health technologies. We reveal how AISCs are used in healthcare delivery,
discuss how AI transforms conventional understandings of medical authority, and
derive implications for designing AI-enabled health technology.
