Article Excerpt: Trained using expert-curated therapist conversations and subject to continuous refinement, Dartmouth’s Therabot aims to overcome the risks and limitations of current AI-guided counseling and therapy bots.
In the 2013 movie “Her,” a disembodied AI chatbot companion called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) develops an increasingly intimate relationship with a distraught man, Theodore, who is going through a divorce. Although Theodore understands that he’s interacting with a computer-generated chatbot, he falls in love, experiences longing, and, when the AI is discontinued, feels genuine grief and confusion.
While “Her” is science fiction, the growing presence of AI-guided counseling and therapy programs that claim to foster empathic relationships makes the movie’s themes more prescient by the day. Given this reality, it’s significant that the first randomized controlled trial of a therapy bot in people with clinically relevant mental health symptoms found high efficacy and user satisfaction.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/msxtx3cz
Article Source: Psychiatric News