UBC professor tests AI tech for therapy

A University of British Columbia (UBC) psychology professor says artificial intelligence (AI) has made a psychology questionnaire that he says is as good as the one humans made, and the one psychologists currently use.

Friedrich Götz says he’s used the popular ChatGPT system to make up a new list of questions for patients seeking psychological care.

“What it seems to be good at is helping us to ask questions that, you know, across broad populations help us to better understand who somebody is, but not in a clinical sense,” he told CityNews.

“Personality questions that we are really much more about: ‘Are you an extroverted person, you an open-minded person, or are you a responsible, conscientious person or a sociable person?’”

ChatGPT is an AI program that generates text and interacts with a user in a conversational manner. Götz says he wouldn’t trust the bot without human oversight, especially because results aren’t consistent.

“Sometimes the output is quite erratic. Sometimes it is not useful at all. So I think as of today, it still requires humans to essentially supervise the algorithm and select output. There’s always a bit of garbage coming out,” Götz said, noting robots could still be a useful tool for psychotherapists.

Some practices already offer online services, by video or text, but Raman Gill, a clinical counsellor and owner of Simply Counselling, says she doubts AI could fully replace in-person counselling.

“So already if you go online, there’s assessments for depression, anxiety, there’s things that we thought that already exist, and we have been using them for quite a while yet,” she explained.

“We still do in-person assessments because you get to see the person, you get to notice their mannerisms and notice what their overall demeanour is like. And all of that is related to mental health. There isn’t an AI system right now that would be able to pick up on that.”

Götz, meanwhile, foresees chatbots serving some sort of role in helping with mental health challenges.

“We see already that more and more sophisticated chatbots come along. And I think they can really help with social connection for some people in the sense that they can combat loneliness. But to me, that’s more similar to you talking to a good friend, than it is to you talking to a therapist.”