Human-AI collaboration enables more empathic conversations in text-based peer-to-peer mental health support

卷:5

Article

关键词: PSYCHOTHERAPY-RESEARCH;    CHALLENGES;    PREDICTION;    SUICIDE;    BURDEN;    MEDIA;   

DOI  :  10.1038/s42256-022-00593-2

来源: SCIE

【 摘 要 】

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling systems that augment and collaborate with humans to perform simple, mechanistic tasks such as scheduling meetings and grammar-checking text. However, such human-AI collaboration poses challenges for more complex tasks, such as carrying out empathic conversations, due to the difficulties that AI systems face in navigating complex human emotions and the open-ended nature of these tasks. Here we focus on peer-to-peer mental health support, a setting in which empathy is critical for success, and examine how AI can collaborate with humans to facilitate peer empathy during textual, online supportive conversations. We develop HAILEY, an AI-in-the-loop agent that provides just-in-time feedback to help participants who provide support (peer supporters) respond more empathically to those seeking help (support seekers). We evaluate HAILEY in a non-clinical randomized controlled trial with real-world peer supporters on TalkLife (N = 300), a large online peer-to-peer support platform. We show that our human-AI collaboration approach leads to a 19.6% increase in conversational empathy between peers overall. Furthermore, we find a larger, 38.9% increase in empathy within the subsample of peer supporters who self-identify as experiencing difficulty providing support. We systematically analyse the human-AI collaboration patterns and find that peer supporters are able to use the AI feedback both directly and indirectly without becoming overly reliant on AI while reporting improved self-efficacy post-feedback. Our findings demonstrate the potential of feedback-driven, AI-in-the-loop writing systems to empower humans in open-ended, social and high-stakes tasks such as empathic conversations. AI language modelling and generation approaches have developed fast in the last decade, opening promising new directions in human-AI collaboration. An AI-in-the loop conversational system called HAILEY is developed to empower peer supporters in providing empathic responses to mental health support seekers.

【 授权许可】

Free