Before responding to Lum's typed messages, the program adds the preface: "As an AI language model, I am not a licensed therapist, and I am unable to provide therapy or diagnose any conditions. However, I am here to listen and help in any way I can." For Lum, who uses ChapGPT to pour out her feelings and not much more -- that's exactly what she's looking for. "I often feel better after using online tools for therapy, and it certainly aids my mental and emotional health," Lum told BuzzFeed News. "I enjoy being able to unload my thoughts on ChatGPT, and would consider this an improvement from journaling because I am able to receive feedback on my thoughts and situation."

The Duke University professor was at a statistics conference last year when, she said, she witnessed Steven Scott, a senior artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Google, make sexual advances on one of her female students. According to Heller, when she spoke to Scott later at an event dinner, he was defensive and told the professor that she should be nice to him considering that he had secured her a Google-funded faculty research award. Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites.

Sexual harassment accusations have hit another corner of the tech industry, with allegations involving prominent artificial intelligence researchers, including one at Google, a leader in the field. Data scientist Kristian Lum wrote in a blog this week that a man she called "S" grabbed her inappropriately at an industry conference in 2010 and said he took advantage of another woman she didn't identify on separate occasions. Two people who were told about the conduct from two alleged victims told Bloomberg the man is Steven Scott, a senior researcher at Google. Lum also wrote that a well-respected academic touched her inappropriately on the leg at the same conference and later sent her innuendo-laced messages. The man was later identified as Bradley Carlin, an expert in biostatistics, by people familiar with the alleged conduct. The allegations were widely discussed on social media, drawing supportive comments and similar stories from researchers in academia and leading tech companies, including Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research director, called Lum's post a "powerful and important report."