In the latest technological breakthrough, OpenAI's ChatGPT demonstrated its amazing capabilities in the field of psychotherapy and successfully passed the Turing test. This discovery not only demonstrates the advancement of AI in simulating human conversations, but also reveals that it may be more empathetic than human therapists when providing psychological counseling advice. This research result was reported by the technology media The Decoder and has attracted widespread attention.
The research team conducted an experiment with 830 participants to compare the response effects of ChatGPT with human therapists. The experimental results were remarkable: the accuracy of participants in identifying human therapists' responses was only 56.1%, while the accuracy of identifying ChatGPT responses was only 51.2%. This data suggests that most people face great challenges when distinguishing AI from human therapists’ responses.
What is even more striking is that ChatGPT surpasses human experts in multiple dimensions such as empathy, cultural competence and the Therapy Alliance. Its replies are usually more detailed, with a positive tone, and a rich use of nouns and adjectives, making the overall performance appear more detailed and compassionate. This phenomenon reveals an interesting bias: participants often give lower ratings when they know they read content generated by AI; and generally higher ratings if AI responses are mistaken for humans.
This is not the first time that research shows the potential of artificial intelligence in the field of consulting. Research from the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia also found that ChatGPT provides more balanced and comprehensive advice than humans when dealing with complex social dilemmas, with support from 70% to 85%. Nevertheless, most participants still stated that they prefer human consultants.
With the continuous exploration of AI's potential in mental health services, future research should pay more attention to how to reasonably and effectively integrate AI into the mental health service system while ensuring the quality of treatment to improve people's mental health level. This exploration will not only promote the development of mental health services, but will also open up new areas for the application of AI technology.