Clinician Discourse on Ambient AI Scribes: A Reddit-based Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis

BackgroundAmbient AI scribes are rapidly entering clinical workflows, yet end-user perspectives remain underrepresented in the peer-reviewed literature. Online clinician communities offer an unfiltered window into adoption barriers, perceived benefits, and product-level concerns. ObjectiveTo characterise themes and sentiment in clinician discourse on ambient AI scribes across professional Reddit communities. MethodsWe scraped posts from ten clinically oriented subreddits using twelve AI scribe related queries via the public Reddit JSON API. A two-tier keyword filter retained posts mentioning at least one AI scribe term and one clinical or workflow term. Texts were embedded with all-MiniLM-L6-v2, reduced via UMAP, clustered with HDBSCAN, and labelled using BERTopic with c-TF-IDF keyword extraction. Noise topics matching predefined off-topic patterns (for example, residency match, finance) were removed. Themes were assigned concise labels via Claude Sonnet 4. Sentiment was classified per post using cardiffnlp/twitter-roberta-base-sentiment-latest. ResultsAfter filtering, 176 unique relevant posts from seven active subreddits were retained, with r/FamilyMedicine (n = 64) and r/healthIT (n = 34) dominating. BERTopic produced 12 coherent themes spanning workflow integration, vendor comparison (DAX, Heidi, Freed, Abridge), HIPAA and privacy, mobile and device use, templates and formatting, and research versus clinical use. Overall sentiment was 61.4% neutral, 21.6% positive, and 17.0% negative. The most net-positive theme was DAX/Nuance/AI tools (about 55% positive); the most net-negative were charting fatigue and the freed-AI-scribes discussion thread (about 37 to 40% negative). Engagement (median upvotes and comments) was highest for tool-comparison and pricing themes, indicating salience of practical adoption questions. ConclusionsClinician sentiment toward ambient AI scribes is cautiously favourable but dominated by neutral, problem-solving discourse. Vendor selection, cost, HIPAA compliance, and EHR integration are the most actively debated issues. These insights can inform implementation strategy, vendor benchmarking, and policy guidance for ambient documentation tools.