2/25/2024 0 Comments Ai chatbot healthcare![]() His group has been working with the nonprofit Mental Health America to develop a tool based on the algorithm that powers ChatGPT. “There’s a lot more than putting this into ChatGPT and seeing what happens,” Althoff says. His group has studied how crisis counselors express empathy in text messages and trained LLM programs to give writers feedback based on strategies used by those who are the most effective at getting people out of crisis. While some people may balk at the idea of spilling their secrets to a machine, LLMs can sometimes give better responses than many human users, says Tim Althoff, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. “We could enlarge our workforce by 40 percent by off-loading documentation and reporting to machines,” he says.īut using ChatGPT as a therapist is a more complex matter. Programs such as ChatGPT could easily summarize patients’ sessions, write necessary reports, and allow therapists and psychiatrists to spend more time treating people. The dire shortage of mental health professionals-particularly those willing to work with imprisoned people and those experiencing homelessness-is exacerbated by the amount of time providers need to spend on paperwork, Insel says. Trained on immense amounts of text from across the Internet, these large language model (LLM) chatbots can adopt different personas, ask a user questions and draw accurate conclusions from the information the user gives them.Īs an assistant for human providers, Insel says, LLM chatbots could greatly improve mental health services, particularly among marginalized, severely ill people. New programs such as ChatGPT, however, are much better than previous AIs at interpreting the meaning of a human’s question and responding in a realistic manner. Many mental health providers at the U.K.’s National Health Service use a chatbot from a company called Limbic to diagnose certain mental illnesses. And chatbots are already being used to screen patients by administering standard questionnaires. Both companies say their apps have had more than a million downloads. More recently, popular apps such as those offered by Woebot Health and Wysa have adopted more advanced AI algorithms that can converse with users about their concerns. ![]() The concept of “robot therapists” has been around since at least 1990, when computer programs began offering psychological interventions that walk users through scripted procedures such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. “I appreciate the algorithms have improved, but ultimately I don’t think they are going to address the messier social realities that people are in when they’re seeking help,” says Julia Brown, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Francisco. In the field of mental health, “we don’t have procedures: we have chat we have communication.”īut many experts worry about whether tech companies will respect vulnerable users’ privacy, program appropriate safeguards to ensure AIs don’t provide incorrect or harmful information or prioritize treatment aimed toward affluent healthy people at the expense of people with severe mental illnesses. “There’s no place in medicine that will be so effective as in mental health,” says Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and co-founder of Vanna Health, a start-up company that connects people with serious mental illnesses to care providers. Advanced chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard could help in administering therapy, even if they can’t ultimately replace therapists. ![]() People seeking psychological help often face long waiting lists, and insurance doesn’t always cover therapy and other mental health care. The excitement is understandable, particularly considering the shortage of mental health professionals in the U.S. “In a very scary way, I feel HEARD by ChatGPT.” Other users have talked about asking ChatGPT to act as a therapist because they cannot afford a real one. “ ChatGPT is better than my therapist,” one user wrote, adding that the program listened and responded as the person talked about their struggles with managing their thoughts. On Reddit forums, many users discussing mental health have enthused about their interactions with ChatGPT-OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot, which conducts humanlike conversations by predicting the likely next word in a sentence.
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