How do you teach an AI model to give therapy?

The researchers, a team of psychiatrists and psychologists at Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine, acknowledge these questions in their work. But they also say that the right selection of training data--which determines how the model learns what good therapeutic responses look like--is the key to answering them. The researchers first trained their AI model, called Therabot, on conversations about mental health from across the internet. If you told this initial version of the model you were feeling depressed, it would start telling you it was depressed, too. Responses like, "Sometimes I can't make it out of bed" or "I just want my life to be over" were common, says Nick Jacobson, an associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at Dartmouth and the study's senior author.