A national organization recently decided to use artificial intelligence to staff its helpline for those with an eating disorder. But the experiment was abruptly stopped when the A.I. chatbot started giving out information that may have been harmful.
Earlier this week, the National Eating Disorder Association and researchers on the project said a bug led to the bot straying from the rules."Some of these screenshots that have gone out there about the chatbot recommending dieting, or restricting a certain number of calories, of course, were never part of the chatbot that we developed or evaluated," said Dr. Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft with Washington University School of Medicine.
The chatbot program has been pulled for now. Both sides agree that with funding hard to come by the program to help those with eating disorders needs help. "I do think we've shown that we can develop this tool with guardrails to have helpful conversations with people," Fitzsimmons-Craft said."We can't judge because they're trying something new and it's a good thing to experiment, that's what science and health is all about," she said.
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