Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Can chatbots be therapists? Only if you want them to be

8Oct

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Technology

Can chatbots be therapists? Only if you want them to be

[ad_1] A manager at artificial intelligence firm OpenAI caused consternation recently by writing that she just had "a quite emotional, personal conversation" with her firm's viral chatbot ChatGPT."Never tried therapy before but this is probably it?" Lilian Weng posted on X, formerly Twitter, prompting a torrent of negative commentary accusing her of downplaying mental illness. However, Weng's take on her interaction with ChatGPT may be explained by a version of the placebo effect outlined this week by research in the Nature Machine Intelligence journal. A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Arizona State University asked more than 300 participants to interact with mental health AI programmes and primed them on what to expect.Some were told the chatbot was empatheti...

Phones can detect whether a bridge is strong enough for vehicles to cross: Research

[ad_1] Structural health monitoring systems might soon be a thing of the past. Bridge strength could now be determined from phones with specialized softwares. According to a new study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, certain mobile devices containing special software can potentially garner important data to determine the structural integrity of a bridge while vehicles cross through it.Published in the paper 'Crowdsourcing bridge dynamic monitoring with smartphone vehicle trips', the outcomes of this research could become a less expensive alternative to sets of sensors attached to bridges themselves. "The core finding is that information about structural health of bridges can be extracted from smartphone-collected accelerometer data," said Carlo Ra...

How to test if we’re living in a computer simulation

[ad_1] Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve.Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be – allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart. A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of universes, so we shouldn't be surprised that at least one universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien...