Chancellor’s Research Explores the Impact of AI Chatbots on Mental Health

Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) assistant professor Stevie Chancellor co-authored a study exploring artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and mental health support. The multidisciplinary collaboration between Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and University of Texas at Austin, evaluated AI systems against clinical standards for therapists.

“Our experiments show that these chatbots are not safe replacements for therapists. They don't provide high-quality therapeutic support, based on what we know is good therapy,” said Chancellor, a co-author of the study.

The paper, entitled “Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers,” was recently published and presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). 

Learn more about this work on the College of Science and Engineering website, or read the entire paper on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) website.