Can A.I. Treat Mental Illness?

February 28, 2023

(The New Yorker) – The treatment of mental illness requires imagination, insight, and empathy—traits that A.I. can only pretend to have. And yet, Eliza, which Weizenbaum named after Eliza Doolittle, the fake-it-till-you-make-it heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” created a therapeutic illusion despite having “no memory” and “no processing power,” Christian writes. What might a system like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been trained on vast swaths of the writing on the Internet, conjure? An algorithm that analyzes patient records has no interior understanding of human beings—but it might still identify real psychiatric problems. Can artificial minds heal real ones? And what do we stand to gain, or lose, in letting them try? (Read More)