Semantic Mapping of the ‘AI-Health’ Discourse on Weibo: A Social Computing Analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly entered the health domain, reshaping medical practices, patient–doctor interaction, and public discourse around wellbeing. Yet little is known about how “AI Health” is framed and interpreted by social media users in the Chinese context. This study collected 114,623 Weibo posts containing AI-related keywords and, after rigorous filtering of noise and duplicates, retained 4,277 valid posts explicitly referencing “AI Health” or “Health AI.” Using a multilingual sentence-transformer model word embeddings were computed to capture semantic proximity. Dimensionality reduction via UMAP and density-based clustering with HDBSCAN revealed six major thematic communities within the AI–Health discourse, spanning Medical Health, Advanced Technology, Smart Product, Economy and Business, Safety Awareness, and Material Basis. The resulting semantic network highlights the hybridization of medical, technological, and industrial vocabularies, showing that Chinese social media discussions increasingly frame AI-driven health not merely as a medical innovation but as a sociotechnical ecosystem combining clinical trust, digital entrepreneurship, and risk awareness.