Tra piattaforme e algoritmi: ripensare l’educazione alla salute nell’éra dell’Intelligenza artificiale Between Platforms and Algorithms: Rethinking Health Education in the AI Era

Objectives: this article reflects on the future of health education in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), considering ongoing changes in communication processes and socio-health contexts, including platformization, health literacy, and new forms of mediation. Methods: a theoretical-conceptual analysis is proposed, drawing on sociological and communication literature, with attention to recent contributions on digital health literacy, care relationships, and communicative dynamics in digital ecosystems. Results: the analysis highlights three interpretative trajectories. The first, technocentric, assigns AI a dominant role in health education, with the risk of reducing space for relational and community mediation. The second, linked to market-platform logics, shows how digital technologies may foster commodification and spectacularization of health, while exacerbating inequalities in access and competence. The third, more promising, outlines a co-educational perspective in which AI is critically integrated into educational practices, enhancing the active role of professionals, citizens, and communities, and reinforcing empowerment and agency. The three trajectories do not operate as independent lines but as interconnected dynamics that shape, in different ways, the possibilities of health education within the current digital ecosystem. Elements already observable, such as the rise of health influencers and the new forms of communicative mediation they exercise between citizens and institutions, appear as early indicators of these transformations and provide a lens to understand how AI is accelerating the reconfiguration of health education. Conclusions: in light of these dynamics, the question of whether it still makes sense to speak of health education is not merely theoretical, but concerns the field’s ability to reinvent itself. This article argues that health education is not outdated, but needs to be rethought as a critical and inclusive practice, capable of combining human mediation, digital literacies, and awareness of the algorithmic logics that structure contemporary information ecosystems.