• 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

  • Finally, A Successful Starship Launch – What This Means For The Moon Landings
  • 26 Years After Launch, The ISS Will Try A New Way To Stay In Orbit Next Month
  • The World Map As You Know It Is Misleading – Now Africa Wants To Change That
  • “It’s Totally Wacky”: Oldest Known Ankylosaur Had A Kind Of Armor Never Seen In Any Vertebrate – Living Or Extinct
  • “Lost City Of The Amazon” Wasn’t Destroyed By A Volcano After All
  • Why Do Hammerhead Sharks Have A Hammerhead?
  • Neanderthals In Iberia Had Funerary Practices – They’re Just Not What We Expected
  • Monochrome Rainbows: In The Right Circumstances, Rainbows Can Look Very Strange Indeed
  • Shark Teeth Are Losing Their Bite As Ocean Acidification Takes Hold
  • Wasp “Riding A Broomstick” Among Fantastic Finalists Of Wildlife Photographer Of The Year
  • Long-Lost Sailback Houndshark Not Seen Since 1973 Rediscovered In Papua New Guinea
  • How Do You Age A Gas Giant? Jupiter’s Age Revealed By “Molten Rock Raindrops”
  • JWST Observes Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS: “One Of The Most Unusual Comets Ever Seen”
  • A Woman Injected Crushed Black Widow To Get High, And It Was A Very Bad Trip
  • Man With 31-Year History Of Depression Feels “Overwhelming Joy” After Experimental Brain Stimulation
  • The Pythagorean Theorem Predates Pythagoras By 1,000 Years: “The Proof Is Carved Into Clay”
  • Asteroid Bennu Is A “Frankenstein’s Monster” Of Material From The Inner Solar System, Outer, And Beyond
  • Canada Is Home To The World’s First Official UFO Landing Pad
  • Path Of Hurricane Erin, One Of The Fastest-Strengthening Storms On Record, Captured In Dramatic Satellite Images
  • What Did Ancient People Think When They Found Fossils?
  • 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