About 1 in every 8 U.S. teenagers and young adults turns to artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots for mental health advice, a new study says.
AI bots offer a cheap and immediate ear for younger people’s concerns, worries and woes, researchers wrote in JAMA Network Open. However, it’s not clear that these programs are up to the challenge, researchers warned.
“There are few standardized benchmarks for evaluating mental health advice offered by AI chatbots, and there is limited transparency about the datasets that are used to train these large language models,” investigator Jonathan Cantor said in a news release. He’s a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.
The new study follows on a report that OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to delusions and suicide, according to The Associated Press.
In the country where mental healthcare is expensive as fuck off insurance and you have to figure out if anyone is in network on insurance? The country filled with employers that don’t recognize mental health as a valid call out reason and barely give employees time off anyway?
You don’t say
It’s a shame. How many really cool people are we going to lose because in desperation they turned towards a chatbot who they believed was intelligent.
Hell. How many peers, potential partners, or family will we lose?
It’s going to get worse before it has a chance to get better.
For all of you kids who feel like they’re struggling: there’s nothing wrong with you if you feel like you’re out of place, or you don’t agree with how things are, society has turned into a fun house mirror version of itself, so you just have to find something that makes you happy no matter how small or silly. I know it seems trite, but just learn to appreciate small things. All that fashion, nice cars, ridiculous food and illogically wasteful large houses are just fluff, it’s fine if you enjoy that but it’s nothing and not a measure of your worth. Love who and what you love and be proud of who you are. There’s BILLIONS of people on the world, not everyone has to be a go getter, we need dreamers no matter how hard they try to replace us.
there’s nothing wrong with you if you feel like you’re out of place
This has been true since forever. The Breakfast Club was a true story. :)
So weird seeing so many kids on lemmy claim to be ADHD or autistic over perfectly normal human foibles. c/autism is all memes about the weird shit we all experience growing up, and long after, often forever. Doesn’t make me angry, but it’s damned frustrating that no one is telling them their weird behaviors and feelings are perfectly normal.
My daughter is on the spectrum, was obvious to my niece (master’s in behavioral therapy) that she had sensory processing issues even as she first learned to walk.
But she never had the issue where she couldn’t make eye contact. That’s a new thing as the internet has told her, “You have autism, this is how you act.”
Anyway, your whole post should be required reading for young folks, and some older folks as well.
I’m not sure a lot or even many of them are kids, lemmy is a bit of an older crowd I’ve gathered, anyways while of lot of them ring true for some people, when every one of them is something you do sometimes without even thinking about it. There were a lot of people who slipped through the cracks in my generation (genx) and no doubt many others because our behaviors weren’t recognized by ourselves or adults as anything abnormal. I’m struggling quite a bit now. I do agree with you that is probably happening a lot too, but on the other hand there’s been an abundance of undiagnosis. Thank you for the kind words about my post, maybe there’s some hope for me yet haha.
No shit, you need to be well well off to be able to safely afford therapy
I’m about to turn to ChatGPT for advice. Yes, I understand the rabbit hole. You have to be extremely cautious and cut it off after a reply or two. Otherwise you can manipulate it into saying anything you like, consciously or unconsciously.
But what else can I do? My American ass can’t afford therapy, far as I can tell Obamacare doesn’t cover it and I’m about to lose that anyway. I’m at the bottom of a hole I’ve never in my 54 years experienced and my wife needs therapy as well. AI can hardly put us in a worse place. (Given that I understand the limitations and don’t take it as actual therapy or intelligence. I’ve lost all executive function, not my entire brain.)
