Emotional Support Experiment With AI Chatbot Prompts Backlash

Chatbots are most often used for low-level customer service and sales task automation, but researchers have been trying to make them perform more sophisticated tasks such as therapy. Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock

The co-founder of an online mental health support service is facing backlash for allegedly using an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to automate responses to users without their consent.

Rob Morris, who started the Koko mental health forum when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posted about the experiment on Twitter before being accused of conducting an experiment on unwitting users in the comment thread.