• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Controversial Experiment Saw Mental Health Support Provided Using AI

January 9, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

An experiment that saw mental health support provided to about 4,000 humans using an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has been met with severe criticism online, over concerns about informed consent.

On Friday, Rob Morris, co-founder of the social media app Koko, announced the results of an experiment his company had run using GPT-3.  

Advertisement

Koko allows people to volunteer their problems to other users, who then try to help them “rethink”  the situation, in what has been likened to a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. For the experiment, Koko users could opt to have an AI helper compose responses to human users, which they could then use (or modify or replace if necessary). 

“Messages composed by AI (and supervised by humans) were rated significantly higher than those written by humans on their own (p < .001). Response times went down 50%, to well under a minute," Morris wrote on Twitter.

“And yet… we pulled this from our platform pretty quickly. Why?” he added. “Once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn’t work. Simulated empathy feels weird, empty.”

Advertisement

While he went on to suggest that this could be because language models – essentially really, really good autocomplete – do not have human lived experience and so their responses come across as inauthentic, a lot of people focused on whether the participants had provided informed consent.

In a later clarification, Morris stressed that they “were not pairing people up to chat with GPT-3, without their knowledge”.

People have pointed out that it is not clear how the statement “everyone knew about the feature” fits with the claim “once people learned the messages were co-written by a machine, it didn’t work”. 

Morris told Insider that the study was “exempt” from informed consent law, pointing to a previous study by the company which had also been exempt, and that “every individual has to provide consent to use the service”.

“This imposed no further risk to users, no deception, and we don’t collect any personally identifiable information or personal health information (no email, phone number, ip, username, etc),” he added.

A better look at the methodology would help to clarify when informed consent was given and when the participants learned that responses could have been created by (human-supervised) AI. However, it is unclear at this stage whether the data will be published, with Morris now describing it to Insider as not a university study, “just a product feature explored”.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. U.N. rights chief regrets lack of access to Xinjiang
  2. New Age Meats bites into $25M for cultured meat product line development
  3. Conagra flags price increases to cushion inflation impact, raises sales forecast
  4. A Video From 1938 Has People Convinced Of Time Travel. But What The Hell Is Really Going On?

Source Link: Controversial Experiment Saw Mental Health Support Provided Using AI

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Wondrous And Worrying Sights: What Explorers Discovered At The Bottom Of The Great Blue Hole
  • What’s The Biggest Volcano In The World? It Depends How You’re Measuring
  • “Every Species On The Planet Self-Medicates In Some Way”: How Wild Animals Use Medicine
  • Deepest Complex Ecosystem Ever Discovered 10 Kilometers Below The Sea, 892-Kilometer “Megaflash” Lightning Sets New World Record, And Much More This Week
  • The Life And Death Of David Vetter, The Boy Who Lived His Whole Life In A Bubble
  • Time’s Arrow Within Glass Appears To Go Both Ways, Raising Huge Questions
  • World’s “Oldest Baby” Born From Embryo Frozen In 1994 In New World Record
  • What Can Spain’s “Tunnel Of Bones” Tell Us About The Fate Of Human Species On The Brink Of Extinction?
  • Rhino Horns Go Radioactive As Anti-Poaching Project Gets Off The Ground
  • Manta Rays Officially Get Third New Species – 15 Years After First Suspected
  • “Space Hurricanes” Are Happening At Earth’s Poles – And They Can Affect GPS Signals
  • There Is A Crucial Reason Why We Will Never See The Big Bang Directly With Our Telescopes
  • How Does An MRI Machine Work?
  • Catch A Glimpse Of One Of The World’s Rarest Sharks In Dreamy New Footage
  • A One-Shot Vaccine For HIV Might Actually Be On The Cards
  • Chikungunya Virus Is Spreading In China: As CDC Considers Travel Advisory, Here’s What To Know
  • First-Of-Its-Kind Vagus Nerve Implant Gets FDA Approval As A Therapy For Rheumatoid Arthritis
  • First Time Crystal Made Of “Exotic” Giant Atoms 1,000 times Larger Than Hydrogen
  • Prehistoric Humans Began Eating Tubers 700,000 Years Before Our Teeth Evolved To Do So
  • The World’s Oldest Wild Bird “Surprised” Everyone With A Hatched Chick At 74
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version