Did you know AI Therapy Study Finds ChatGPT More Effective Than Humans, But Experts Warn of Risks and Guidelines

 

According to a new study published in PLOS Mental Health, ChatGPT is way better at couple therapy than most human therapists. 830 participants were randomly assigned a human professional therapist and a ChatGPT model and were asked to compare human therapists with ChatGPT. The researchers asked participants to rate the quality of therapy they received based on five criteria: how much the counselor understood the speaker, whether the advice given by the counselor was fitting, how empathetic the counselor was, whether their suggestions aligned with something they would expect a good therapist to say and whether the counselor showed cultural sensitivity.

The researchers thought that participants wouldn’t be able to tell a human response apart from an AI generated one. Participants correctly guessed a human response 56.1% of the time and guessed ChatGPT's response 51.2% of the time. This was important to know because it showed that results of the study weren’t impacted by what the participants thought the responses came from. But participants rated the responses from human therapists higher than those from ChatGPT.

When the researchers gathered the ratings for the results, they found that responses from ChatGPT got the highest ratings because most participants thought they were from human therapists. The responses from human therapists got the lowest ratings because the participants thought they were from ChatGPT. All in all, the responses from ChatGPT received the highest ratings from the participants because they felt more culturally sensitive and felt a connection with them.

The researchers speculated that the main reason why ChatGPT is better than human therapists is that it uses more nouns and adjectives in its responses while human therapists try to be curt. As ChatGPT can contextualize better, this led to the participants rating its responses higher.

Even though using ChatGPT for therapy showed good results, the researchers suggest that completely relying on it is risky if it is not under controlled settings. AI therapy can become a commercial product soon because many people seek life advice on ChatGPT and Claude but it should all happen under proper guidelines. AI is also being used for diagnosing patients with a 90% success rate, while there is a 74% diagnosis success rate for doctors who are using AI chatbots for diagnosing.