AI's Mind-Bending Effects: Mental Health's New Frontier

Because I think the scary thing is that mental health professionals are flying blind. I've talked to a number of them who don't necessarily use ChatGPT that much themselves, so they don't even know how to handle a patient who is talking about these things, because it's unfamiliar and this is all so new. But if we had open research that was robust and peer-reviewed and could say, "Okay, we know what this looks like and we can create protocols to ensure that people remain safe," that would be a really good step, I think, towards figuring this out.

It is continually surprising to me how even people with a ton of literacy on how these technologies work, slip into anthropomorphizing chatbots or assigning more intelligence than they might actually have. You can imagine the average person that isn't deep in the science of large language models, it's really easy to be completely wowed by what they can do and to start to lose a grip on what you're actually interacting with. We are all socialized now to take a lot of meaning from text, right?

A lot of us, the primary mode that we communicate with our loved ones, especially if we don't live together, is through texting, right? So it's like you have this similar interface with this chatbot. It's not that unusual that you don't necessarily hear the chatbot's voice, although you can communicate with ChatGPT using voice now, but we already trained to take a lot of meaning from text to believe that there's a person on the other end of that text.

And there's a lot of evidence that shows we're not socializing as much as we once did.