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Tag: mental health

  • A deadly love affair with a chatbot – Der Spiegel

    In hindsight, one can say that Sewell’s parents tried everything. They spoke with their son. They tried to find out what was bothering him. What he was doing on his phone all those hours in his room. Nothing, Sewell told them. He showed them his Instagram and TikTok accounts. They found hardly any posts from him; he only watched a few videos now and then. They looked at his WhatsApp history but found nothing unsettling – and that in itself was unsettling, given that their son was becoming less and less reachable. They agreed that they would take his cell phone from him at bedtime.

    They had never heard of Character:AI, the app which, with the help of artificial intelligence and information provided by the user, creates digital personalities that speak and write like real people – chatbots, basically. And their son told them nothing of his secret world in which, he believed, a girl named Daenerys Targaryen was waiting for him to share her life with him.

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  • The first trial of generative AI therapy shows it might help with depression – MIT Technology Review

    Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, an assistant professor of health ethics at Simon Fraser University who has written about AI therapy bots but was not involved in the research, says the results are impressive but notes that just like any other clinical trial, this one doesn’t necessarily represent how the treatment would act in the real world. “We remain far from a ‘greenlight’ for widespread clinical deployment,” he wrote in an email.

    One issue is the supervision that wider deployment might require. During the beginning of the trial, Jacobson says, he personally oversaw all the messages coming in from participants (who consented to the arrangement) to watch out for problematic responses from the bot. If therapy bots needed this oversight, they wouldn’t be able to reach as many people.

    I asked Jacobson if he thinks the results validate the burgeoning industry of AI therapy sites. “Quite the opposite,” he says, cautioning that most don’t appear to train their models on evidence-based practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, and they likely don’t employ a team of trained researchers to monitor interactions. “I have a lot of concerns about the industry and how fast we’re moving without really kind of evaluating this,” he adds.

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  • Well, that’s not good – Futurism

    In a new joint study, researchers with OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that this small subset of ChatGPT users engaged in more “problematic use,” defined in the paper as “indicators of addiction… including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.” … Though the vast majority of people surveyed didn’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT, those who used the chatbot for longer periods of time seemed to start considering it to be a “friend.” The survey participants who chatted with ChatGPT the longest tended to be lonelier and get more stressed out over subtle changes in the model’s behavior, too.

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  • Human therapists prepare for battle against A.I. pretenders – The New York Times

    Dr. Evans said he was alarmed at the responses offered by the chatbots. The bots, he said, failed to challenge users’ beliefs even when they became dangerous; on the contrary, they encouraged them. If given by a human therapist, he added, those answers could have resulted in the loss of a license to practice, or civil or criminal liability. […]

    Early therapy chatbots, such as Woebot and Wysa, were trained to interact based on rules and scripts developed by mental health professionals, often walking users through the structured tasks of cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T. Then came generative A.I., the technology used by apps like ChatGPT, Replika and Character.AI. These chatbots are different because their outputs are unpredictable; they are designed to learn from the user, and to build strong emotional bonds in the process, often by mirroring and amplifying the interlocutor’s beliefs.

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  • Constantly scrolling on your phone? Why we can’t stand feeling bored – The Guardian

    People hate feeling bored. We hate it so much that we spend hours mindlessly scrolling through our phones. Many of us would rather experience physical discomfort than sit quietly with our own thoughts, as a 2014 University of Virginia study found. Nearly half of participants sitting alone in a room for 15 minutes, with no stimulation other than a button that would administer a mild electric shock, pressed the button.

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  • Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive – Mishell Baker: Bluesky

    Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce. … You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad… you are turning away from those opportunities.

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  • A life nearly wrecked — and then rescued — by books – The Washington Post

    What could such an enviously exacting stylist find so horrifying about the written word? The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.”

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  • Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety – Reuters

    Egami’s study found that owning a game console and increased gameplay reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction among participants. The study found that spending just one extra hour each day playing video games was associated with an increase in mental health and life satisfaction.

    Other studies also point to a shift in perceptions of gaming. “As more research has emerged related to video games, we’re beginning to recognize that they can actually offer a lot of benefits,” said Michael Wong, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at McMaster University and former professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

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  • Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens – Sage Journals

    Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

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  • Singapore is turning to AI to care for its rapidly aging population – Rest of World

    Studies show that AI companions like Dexie can be just as effective in reducing loneliness as interacting with another person. For Singapore, where an aging population is rapidly becoming the majority and elders are getting lonelier, authorities see the potential of AI tools to assist in preventive illness care, a key emphasis of the city-state’s health care system. […]

    In 2024, the government committed over 1 billion Singapore dollars ($730 million) to boost AI capabilities over the next five years. Among the many eldercare AI projects in the pipeline is a generative AI application called MemoryLane for the elderly to document their life stories. The project is being piloted at several St Luke’s ElderCare Active Ageing Centres. Khoo Teck Puat, a local hospital, has developed a generative AI–based tool to create “visual pillboxes” to remind seniors of their pill regimens, while RoboCoach Xian, a robot trainer, is helping senior citizens stay healthy through physical exercise routines.

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  • Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world – The Guardian

    The pandemic emptied out the streets, but this is another kind of emptiness – it often seems as though fewer people are out and about, but also the people still present are a lot less present. Had this happened overnight it would be a sci-fi horror movie scenario – people seeming numbed, dazed, their attention captured and manipulated by the contents of tiny devices controlled by powerful corporations, a billion Manchurian candidates in a wifi-equipped Metropolis. A Night of the Living Dead to You. But it’s happened so incrementally it’s become normal for us all to be in that limbo, that bardo.

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  • Gamer role introduced in children’s hospital – BBC News

    A Scottish children’s hospital charity has introduced a gamer in residence for young patients in Glasgow. The new job involves visiting children to play video games with them, preventing boredom and providing some light relief. Steven Mair, who was appointed by the Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity, says gaming has already provided huge benefits to the patients. He said that playing Mario Kart has improved the mobility of a patient’s hand and that it was also a useful tool in distracting the children during medical procedures. “One of my first sessions here at the hospital was a patient who was on a plasma exchange and that can be quite intrusive”, he added. “When I went in to play with that patient, it kept him distracted throughout the whole procedure.” Josephine, the mum of eight-year-old Laura Jayne, said her daughter had been in hospital for six months. She said: “It’s been really good just to pass the time. Sometimes it helps her to interact with the gamers. She really gets a lot out of it.”

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