AI and Mental Health

As we build systems whose capabilities more and more resemble those of humans, despite the fact that those systems work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way humans work, it becomes increasingly tempting to anthropomorphise them. Humans have evolved to co-exist over many millions of years, and human culture has evolved over

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Beyond being skeptical about the prospects for an “intelligent machine,” Weizenbaum also recognized how computers were beginning to be invoked as an easy way out of complex, contingent, and multifaceted challenges. This attitude — now widespread— was particularly evident in the education field. In the 1985 interview with The Tech , Weizenbaum was... See more

🚨 New AI therapy study just dropped Patients chatted with an app called Therabot for several months in a clinical trial. Outcomes were comparable to "gold-standard cognitive therapy," according to the research director. 51% drop in depression symptoms and 31% for... See more

America is undergoing a full-on mental health crisis, and a lot of people are turning to AI therapists. It’s now common to criticize AI therapists—shouldn’t we be helping people see actual humans , people argue? Well, yes. But the thing is: healthcare is pretty broken, and access to care is gated.

What emerges from this is a portrait of technology as inevitable progress that must, despite its inevitability, be fully embraced without hesitation. For the tech evangelist, artificial intelligence research is self-evidently necessary, the next triumph in the ever-rising pyramid of human achievement and progress. In this discourse, AI allows... See more

“Can machines be therapists?” is a question receiving increased attention given the relative ease of working with generative artificial intelligence. Although recent (and decades-old) research has found that humans struggle to tell the difference between responses from machines and humans, recent findings suggest that artificial intelligence can... See more