Chatbots should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations, researchers said.
Even chatbots get the blues. According to a new study, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT shows signs of anxiety when its users share “traumatic narratives” about crime, war or car accidents. And when chatbots get stressed out, they are less likely to be useful in therapeutic settings with people.
The bot’s anxiety levels can be brought down, however, with the same mindfulness exercises that have been shown to work on humans.
Increasingly, people are trying chatbots for talk therapy. The researchers said the trend is bound to accelerate, with flesh-and-blood therapists in high demand but short supply. As the chatbots become more popular, they argued, they should be built with enough resilience to deal with difficult emotional situations.
“I have patients who use these tools,” said Dr. Tobias Spiller, an author of the new study and a practicing psychiatrist at the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich. “We should have a conversation about the use of these models in mental health, especially when we are dealing with vulnerable people.”
A.I. tools like ChatGPT are powered by “large language models” that are trained on enormous troves of online information to provide a close approximation of how humans speak. Sometimes, the chatbots can be extremely convincing: A 28-year-old woman fell in love with ChatGPT, and a 14-year-old boy took his own life after developing a close attachment to a chatbot.
Ziv Ben-Zion, a clinical neuroscientist at Yale who led the new study, said he wanted to understand if a chatbot that lacked consciousness could, nevertheless, respond to complex emotional situations the way a human might.