Brian Chandler, a man in his 20s who works for a bank in Atlanta, suffered from severe anxiety at the start of the pandemic in 2020. While looking for support, he came across Woebot for Adults, a chatbot developed with a team of mental health professionals to provide users with supportive guidance via a series of pre-scripted messages that are engaging, witty, and empathic.
That’s where apps like Woebot come in, which my team at Leaps has invested in. To date, around 1.5 million people have interacted with Woebot since its debut in 2017, and randomized, controlledhave demonstrated its ability to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression across people of varying demographics. Interestingly, 75 percent of users’ messages happen outside of business hours, when people can’t traditionally access a therapist.
Woebot Health, for instance, is now studying how it can incorporate generative AI within the confines of research that has received approval from an institutional review board. Using it to understand users’ free text for a more personalized performance is a different and potentially easier application than using it to respond to users directly. That’s where extra caution, guardrails, and human oversight are needed.
“The dangers are higher with LLMs to independently administer psychotherapy than the benefits right now,” he said, adding that the tools are evolving so fast, “you basically cannot publish a peer-reviewed paper.” He began a systematic review of AI tools for mental health a year and a half ago, before ChatGPT came out. The latest iteration, GPT-4, is even more advanced in its capacity to receive and generate outputs.
“If you try Pi today, it’s very difficult if not impossible to cause it to say something that is in any way homophobic, judgmental, racist, it doesn’t engage in any conspiracy theories, none of the prompt hacks work,” Suleyman said to audience applause. “It shows that if you’re very intentional and deliberate and start from first principles, trying to create a very boundaried and safe AI, it is possible.”Where the future will take us with generative AI is still anyone’s guess.