Recently, a study revealed that OpenAI's ChatGPT has passed the Turing Test in the field of psychotherapy, demonstrating that it can provide psychological counseling advice with greater empathy than human therapists. This finding comes from a recent report by the tech media outlet The Decoder.
The research team invited 830 participants to compare the responses of ChatGPT and human therapists. The results showed that the participants' ability to identify the responses was only slightly better than random guessing, with a probability of accurately identifying human therapist responses at 56.1%, while the probability for ChatGPT responses was 51.2%. This indicates that many people face considerable difficulty in distinguishing between AI and human therapists.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, image licensed from service provider Midjourney
Even more surprisingly, ChatGPT generally received higher scores than human experts in empathy, cultural competence, and therapeutic alliance. Its responses are often longer, more positive in tone, and utilize more nouns and adjectives, making the overall performance appear more detailed and compassionate. This phenomenon has led to an interesting bias: when participants believed they were reading AI-generated content, they tended to give lower ratings; conversely, if AI responses were mistakenly thought to be written by humans, the ratings were generally higher.
This is not the first study to confirm the potential of artificial intelligence in the counseling field. Research from the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia also found that ChatGPT provides more balanced and comprehensive advice when addressing social dilemmas, receiving support rates of 70% to 85%. Nevertheless, most participants still indicated a preference for human advisors.
As the potential of AI in mental health services continues to be explored, future research should focus more on how to effectively and reasonably integrate AI into the mental health service system while ensuring the quality of care, to enhance people's mental health outcomes.
