Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A therapy chatbot for depression

businessinsider.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 77 posts

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#31

Post by aianus »

pdeuchler wrote: post #20
WalterSear wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent CBT therapist can charge $150+ per hour, and personal change can take years of constant, ongoing effort. For most people right now, it's going to be an app or no treatment at all, particularly if for people who are only mildly impaired by their distress. Besides, it's not an either/or proposition. Personally, I don't think that chatbots are all that useful (I've been building them as a large part of my job f…

Something isn't adding up here... if this is supposed to be supplemental therapy to talking with an actual human, but instead the actual human part is nixed and it is used as the entirety of therapy (i.e. outside of it's prescribed and tested usage) are we not worried about the negative externalities of replacing human contact with machines for curing social ills? That's not even touching where you've just pointed ou…

The status quo is poor people talk to nobody and rich people talk to humans. This is an improvement, no?

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

Kenji wrote: post #24
TeMPOraL wrote: post #17

You can easily fool people into thinking they're talking with a person even though they're talking with a machine. But I wonder, can you do the same if they know they're talking with a machine? Or even, could you make yourself feel a program is human? Simpler question: with a sufficiently-smart story generator, could you enjoy it if you knew it was procedurally generated? I feel that I couldn't. But I'd love to be wr…

>You can easily fool people into thinking they're talking with a person even though they're talking with a machine. Citation needed. After 5 minutes of chatting with a robot, you conclude it's either an insane clown or a robot.

I fooled enough people with my half-assed IRC bot that did a bit of fuzzy pattern-matching for natural language queries.

It's harder to fool someone in an actual, focused 1:1 conversation, but it's easy to do in brief interactions when people don't suspect the other party may be a bot.

See also: automated news stories, autogeneration of e-mails, etc.

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#33

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

aianus wrote: post #31
pdeuchler wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something isn't adding up here... if this is supposed to be supplemental therapy to talking with an actual human, but instead the actual human part is nixed and it is used as the entirety of therapy (i.e. outside of it's prescribed and tested usage) are we not worried about the negative externalities of replacing human contact with machines for curing social ills? That's not even touching where you've just pointed ou…

The status quo is poor people talk to nobody and rich people talk to humans. This is an improvement, no?

No.

The status quo is poor people talk to social contacts (eg, friends, family, church community, etc) while rich people talk to professionals (eg, therapists).

This is a change in that poor people are being moved to a professionally manufactured tool, which isn't necessarily an improvement -- it's just replacing an established, ad hoc system with an unknown technical one.

There's every possibility that it would make the situation worse and it's hubris on the part of the medical community that a tool built by them is better than informal therapists.

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#34

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

659087 wrote: post #16

Feeding this data to Facebook, a company already known to perform unethical psychological experiments on users without consent, is beyond stupid. If the people behind this are aware of Facebook's history and practices, I'd consider it malicious to choose to expose depressed people to their platform.

It's gross-negligence at the very least.

Facebook routinely experiments on people in a way that's dangerous to people with mental health issues (and likely even healthy adults).

Opening up their treatment to Facebook is incredibly negligent.

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#35

Post by pdeuchler »

aianus wrote: post #31
pdeuchler wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something isn't adding up here... if this is supposed to be supplemental therapy to talking with an actual human, but instead the actual human part is nixed and it is used as the entirety of therapy (i.e. outside of it's prescribed and tested usage) are we not worried about the negative externalities of replacing human contact with machines for curing social ills? That's not even touching where you've just pointed ou…

The status quo is poor people talk to nobody and rich people talk to humans. This is an improvement, no?

If the alternative is sequestering them into talking to an AI controlled by the people who get to talk to humans, then unequivocally no

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#37

Post by DigDugDoug »

WalterSear wrote: post #14
pdeuchler wrote: post #13

There seems to be a new push for technological problems to social illnesses, and it consistently boggles my mind how so many smart "experts" really think people engaging more with computers/phones/AI instead of, you know, engaging more with actual people will solve any kind of social ill.

A decent CBT therapist can charge $150+ per hour, and personal change can take years of constant, ongoing effort. For most people right now, it's going to be an app or no treatment at all, particularly if for people who are only mildly impaired by their distress. Besides, it's not an either/or proposition. Personally, I don't think that chatbots are all that useful (I've been building them as a large part of my job f…

It seems like the real danger is the appeal of sacrificing nuanced treatment for convenient treatment. Your comment pointed out that for many people the choice might boil down to a supportive app or nothing. And as you noted, personal change can take years of dedicated person effort.

To me, it seems like the biggest risk in the long term isn't in whether or not people get treated. The article demonstrates that the technology needed to make widely available mental health treatment options is being explored and worked on. The danger in my mind comes afterwards when the technology is performing acceptably but not comprehensively. It seems like at that stage there is a possibility of people not seeking more rigorous/advanced treatment from a professional, once they have the opportunity to do so, because they may already view the app as being good enough and any failures to improve beyond what they've already experienced through the app as personal failures rather than treatment failures.

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#38

Post by blacksmith_tb »

drdeca wrote: post #23
TeMPOraL wrote: post #17

You can easily fool people into thinking they're talking with a person even though they're talking with a machine. But I wonder, can you do the same if they know they're talking with a machine? Or even, could you make yourself feel a program is human? Simpler question: with a sufficiently-smart story generator, could you enjoy it if you knew it was procedurally generated? I feel that I couldn't. But I'd love to be wr…

> Simpler question: with a sufficiently-smart story generator, could you enjoy it if you knew it was procedurally generated? I feel that I couldn't. I feel like this might commit you to having some amount of conflict with "death of the author"? If one cares that the writing was written by a person, and not just transcribed by a person, but composed by a person, it seems to me like one probably cares that the writing…

What if it was ML trained on all the novels in Project Gutenberg? I would think the general style of writing could be convincing, but I wonder about things like overall plot, character development, and pacing. At least for a human author, those require a certain degree of planning, it would be interesting to see if AI could just 'let them happen' or if it'd be the literary equivalent of a shaggy dog joke.

Re: A therapy chatbot for depression

#39

Post by andrewtbham »

pdeuchler wrote: post #13

There seems to be a new push for technological problems to social illnesses, and it consistently boggles my mind how so many smart "experts" really think people engaging more with computers/phones/AI instead of, you know, engaging more with actual people will solve any kind of social ill.

Hacker news used to be a site with optimistic people, entrepreneurs, people that did stuff, people that built stuff... now it's all whining about people that are actually doing things.

It makes me think of the roosevelt speech...

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

does anyone here have anything constructive to add?

Post reply on HN