Article Excerpt: In the summer of 1956, a small group of researchers spent eight weeks at Dartmouth College pursuing an audacious premise: that human intelligence could be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it.
The proposal that convened them, written the year before by Dartmouth mathematician John McCarthy and three colleagues, had given the subject a name — the first time the phrase “artificial intelligence” appeared in print. The workshop is now widely regarded as the birth of the field.
Seventy years later, Dartmouth psychiatrist Michael Heinz is testing one of the harder claims within that premise: that a machine can do therapy. He describes a patient who leaves a session with an assignment and, instead of facing it alone, has a chatbot along for the ride.“You think about having this interactive intervention with you that could really go into those exposures and kind of help guide you through the different exercises,” said Heinz, the first author on the clinical trial behind Therabot.
Therabot, built inside Dartmouth’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, is the first generative AI mental health chatbot to show clinical results in a published trial. Heinz, an attending psychiatrist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, began the work in 2019 with clinical psychologist Nicholas Jacobson — four years before ChatGPT made the technology a household name.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/yt596ku2
Article Source: Valley News