"A mental health tech company ran an AI experiment on real users":
When people log in to Koko, an online emotional support chat service based in San Francisco, they expect to swap messages with an anonymous volunteer. They can ask for relationship advice, discuss their depression or find support for nearly anything else — a kind of free, digital shoulder to lean on.
But for a few thousand people, the mental health support they received wasn’t entirely human. Instead, it was augmented by robots...
“People who saw the co-written GTP-3 responses rated them significantly higher than the ones that were written purely by a human. That was a fascinating observation,” [Koko co-founder Robert Morris] said.
The experiment also aroused a ton of controversy over the ethics.
