What Do Chatbots Have To Do With Our Health?
By Chavonn Shen
With AI Comes New Challenges
With people turning to AI for everything from academic help to creating art, using technology for medical help isn’t that far out of the question. In a university experiment, ChatGPT was rated as more empathetic and useful than actual medical professionals. This leads to some interesting conclusions: The first one being humans are tired. God knows that the pandemic puts unparalleled strain on healthcare providers in an already strained system. The second is that chatbots are bound to be used in even higher-stakes medical settings.
Artificial intelligence is exactly that—artificial. Chatbots using AI inevitably run the risk of hurting someone as they don’t think and feel. AI can gather information from all corners of the internet at a breakneck speed, but it doesn’t know how to filter through that information thoughtfully. When a chatbot takes information from the internet, which is a source as powerful as it is problematic, it can create powerfully problematic scenarios. Chatbots may find material that fits the prompt it is given, but they won’t know how to process that material with the human heart, human feelings in mind.
Will Chatbots Affect Our Health?
The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) released a chatbot, Tessa, to aid their helpline services. After one user decided to test the chatbot by asking how to support a person with an eating disorder, Tessa started giving weight loss tips and suggested that the user should limit their calories. This “advice” is not only spouting unhelpful diet culture rhetoric but can be dangerous to those in eating disorder recovery…
Chavonn Shen (she/they)