Contemporary technologies are making great strides in improving human health. Us students have had the pleasure of witnessing what a combination of AR and AI can do for the visually impaired during the third Information Strategy lecture. All of us can be very thankful for technology doing a considerable amount of the heavy lifting in the health sector these days, as it is estimated that by 2030 there will be a shortage of 10 million health workers globally (World Health Organization, 2023).
While its purpose in combatting physical ailments seems straightforward, technology does not quite have as much of an impact in the prevention of mental health issues. Therefore, I wanted to investigate ChatGPT’s potential to help out those with dark thoughts. Obviously ChatGPT is trained to be a very general model, aimed at providing helpful outputs to an extremely broad range of topics. Nonetheless, a peek at its capabilities could still be insightful.
After explaining ‘my situation’ to ChatGPT, the AI came up with some standard tips on how to deal with it. This wasn’t a bad first response per se, but I wanted to see if I could push it a little further by further explaining my situation.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT’s responses never became more focused on my specific problem. Instead of aiming to have a better understanding of why I was feeling a certain way, perhaps something a human therapist would do, ChatGPT mostly kept returning lists of very general advice.
In conclusion, it does not look like ChatGPT can do a whole lot more for one’s mental health than the average Google search. Perhaps an application which combines generative AI, to ‘form conversations’ with people, and predictive modelling, utilizing strictly mental health data, could form responses which would be helpful at a higher level.
References
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Sep 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com /
World Health Organization: WHO. (2023). Health Workforce. www.who.int. https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-workforce#tab=tab_1
Really important topic! Seeking help from professional therapist is still really expensive. Unfortunately, because of this, many people cannot financially afford to ask for help, so the their mental health problem is not detected properly.
I also don’t think chatgpt can replace a therapeutic process, but maybe the technology can help many people in the future to give more specific advice to improve their mental health