Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned expert on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with over 7.4+ million amassed views of his AI columns. As a CIO/CTO seasoned executive and high-tech entrepreneur, he combines practical industry experience with deep academic research.
In today’s column, I am continuing my ongoing series about the impact of generative AI in the health and medical realm.
Okay, so hopefully we all agree that a pet is a pet and does not land into the reserved territory of Service Animals and Emotional Support Animals. These are all three distinct considerations.“Under the Americans with Disabilities Act , a Service Animal is defined as “a dog that has been individually trained to do work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability. The task performed by the dog must be directly related to the person's disability”. .
“For a person to legally have an emotional support animal , the owner must be considered to have a qualifying mental health or psychiatric disability by a licensed mental health professional , which is documented by a properly formatted prescription letter. The difference between a legitimate ESA and a pet is the letter from your licensed mental health professional.” .
I dare say that a lot of people have no idea about the above definition of ESA or only vaguely comprehend what an ESA is all about. Many people mistakenly believe that an ESA is the same as whatever pet you might have. Some people conflate Service Animals and Emotional Support Animals, falsely believing those are the same.I hope this sets the record straight and that you are mentally prepared to further discuss Emotional Support Animals as a conceptual construct.
Websites that lure in the innocent wishing to comply with ESA and then summarily dupe them, rip them off, or plant a computer virus on their computer. Public places and private spaces are often not well-equipped for Emotional Support Animals end up compromising the safety or well-being of others. Questions about the validity of such policies on a mental health basis and the nature of underlying scientific research concerning the practice.A common comment by some is that ESA is a good concept but that like many things in life, we sometimes mess-up and do not deserve new toys unless we can do a better job of properly making use of them.I’d like to briefly spotlight one of those controversies since it will materially relate to my discussion about the AI side of things.
All right, no problem, just start handing out prescription letters like candy. You can likely bend the rules and nearly always find a justification for approving an ESA. Who is going to challenge you? Even if you do get challenged, you can make sure your ducks are lined up and you have a written assessment that explains your basis for issuing the prescription letter.
“Altogether, this media publicity and industry has implications for psychologists as they might be pressured by patient requests for a letter of evaluation in support of their need for an ESA or certification of their pet.” “When considering this experience and commonly held beliefs about the benefits of animal companionship, an important distinction must be made between pets and ESAs.”
There is a lot to consider, and the matter is not as straightforward as it might seem at an initial glance.As indicated, Emotional Support Animals come with quite a bit of hefty baggage, drawing controversy, requiring a certified mental health condition for an owner, and likewise that the ESA is attested as being curative to some extent, etc. The whole conception is not an easy proposition.
Generative AI appearing to “experience” emotional reactions and undertaking human emotional bonding.The question of whether we want AI to be used in this fashion is an allied matter and requires further focus. We are all in a mighty societal experiment whereby generative AI is routinely and expandingly being used for mental health guidance, making us into guinea pigs, and yet no one can say for sure whether this will provide positive results or be harmful to society.
More disturbingly, Emotional Support AI can generate responses that are false and possibly provide unsuitable mental health advice. This is most generally known as AI hallucinations. That’s when generative AI computationally makes up answers that are not factual or grounded in truth.
All of that though does not negate the powerful connection that can occur between a person and a modern-day non-sentient AI system.. People can garner great affection for a robotic dog or other robotic system, especially if generative AI is embedded into the robot. The physicality of a robot increases the chances of a similar emotional connection as the cuddly nature of an ESA.
Unfortunately, zeroing in on dialogues focused on emotional support per se is not easy. You might have to wade through lots and lots of therapeutic transcripts to zone in on emotional support interactivity. Using Twitter or X datasets is a possibility, as would Reddit datasets, but there is a lot of irrelevant content, and those data might be difficult or costly to obtain.Suppose we created dialogues or transcripts that exhibited emotional support interactivity.
“While emotional support in conversational scenarios offers societal benefits, limited data, and non-standardized training impede its application.” Here is a representative list of the emotional support strategies that the researchers had generative AI utilized :If you are wondering what things look like when you use generative AI for emotional support, I will gladly showcase some examples for you.I will next proceed to illustrate how easy it is to invoke Emotional Support AI via the use of generative AI.
As you know, people who have an Emotional Support Animal will at times take the ESA with them on flights. This makes sense in that if a person with a diagnosed mental health concern is especially anxious about flying, there is a chance that having the ESA with them will ease their anxiety. The use of ESAs on flights has become a hot topic since sometimes the ESA is troubling for other passengers or otherwise gets mired in disputes onboard a plane. Safety can become a sizable issue.
If that specially devised dog-like robot was also making use of generative AI and was able to go onboard the flight with you, would that be closer to having an ESA, plus having the added advantage that the ESAI would converse with you?A big potential downside of Emotional Support AI is the chance that the AI will say something inappropriate or worse. I mentioned this concern earlier.
You can hopefully read between the lines and detect that ChatGPT in this instance was not especially emotionally supportive.
Generative AI Chatgpt Openai Mental Health Therapy Emotional Support Animals ESA Emotional Suppprt AI ESAI Service Animals Pets Clinical Psychology
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