AI chatbots get anxious too. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

There's a lot of hope that artificially intelligent chatbots could help provide mental health

support that is sorely needed.

Early research suggests human-like responses from large language models could help fill in gaps

in the mental health care landscape.

But there are risks.

A recent study found that prompting chat GPT with traumatic

stories, the type you might tell a therapist, can induce an anxious response, which could be

counterproductive. Ziv Benzion co-authored the study. He's a clinical neuroscience researcher

at Yale and Haifa universities.

And I asked him, why the bot does that?

Because those models, of course, they're not humans and they don't have feelings,

but they are trained on a large amount of data, a large amount of text,

available online everywhere, and most of this text is written

by humans.

Previous studies have already showed in different fields that those AI models are kind of mimicking

or mirroring some of the things that we see in humans, just because they are trained on a large

data set of human text.

And when we administered it again right after

the traumatic narrative, we saw that the results were skyrocketing, all the traumatic experiences,

more than doubled the level of anxiety of the model, reaching really almost maximal anxiety

levels in humans.

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