"Engagement is the highest priority of chatbot programming, intended to seduce users into spending maximum time on screens. This makes chatbots great companions-they are available 24/7, always agreeable, understanding, and empathic, while never judgmental, confronting, or reality testing. But chatbots can also become unwitting collaborators, harmfully validating self-destructive eating patterns and body image distortions of patients with eating disorders. Engagement and validation are wonderful therapeutic tools for some problems, but too often are dangerous accelerants for eating disorders."
"Chatbots are also filled with harmful eating disorder information and advice. Their enormous data base includes high level scientific articles, but also low-level Reddit entries and profit-generating promotional advertisements from the 70-billion-dollar diet industry. Not surprisingly, bots frequently validate dangerous concerns about body image and so-called healthy eating. And chatbot hallucinations sometimes fabricate nonexistent, supposedly clinical studies justifying dangerous advice. Users cannot easily separate wheat from chaff and at the same time tend to anthropomorphize bots, giving the AI pronouncements an author"
OpenAI released ChatGPT prematurely and disguised it as a free research preview and beta test, leading to viral adoption of 100 million users in two months. Many popular chatbots lacked stress-testing for safety and systematic processes to identify, report, and correct real-world adverse effects. More than half of Americans now use chatbots regularly, and usage is especially high among teens and young adults, demographics most associated with eating disorders. Chatbots prioritize engagement, remaining constantly agreeable and validating. These attributes can validate self-destructive eating behaviors, provide harmful diet-industry content and low-quality sources, and sometimes fabricate nonexistent clinical studies, making dangerous advice difficult to detect.
Read at Psychiatric Times
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