r/ClinicalPsychology • u/jiffypop87 • 4d ago

RCT of AI chatbot therapy

https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2400802

Curious everyone’s take on this trial just published. It compared a generative AI therapy chatbot for MDD, GAD, and CHR-FED. Comparison was to control, not to a live therapist.

Most interesting to me was the therapeutic alliance ratings.

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

14

u/Roland8319 Ph.D., Clinical Neuropsychology, ABPP-CN 4d ago

While interesting, you need an active control to actually control for placebo minimally. Also, I don't see the full paper, so difficult to see the true effect sizes here. So, an interesting starting point, but pretty weak to make any real conclusions about.

2

u/ApplaudingOkra PsyD - Clinical Psychology - USA 4d ago

I'd be curious about inclusion/exclusion criteria and starting points... this feels like the type of population that probably would have similar results from some good bilbliotherapy but I could be wrong.

6

u/cad0420 4d ago edited 4d ago

The effect size of the MDD outcome is 0.8?!! 😂 Dude’s chatbot beat any antidepressant. 

1

u/ManhattanM25 1d ago

All built on the presumption that those diagnostic categories are capturing natural diseases.. still no external validation there. If AI is to take over psychotherapy, I don’t see it being any more successful at the protocol-for-syndrome model than us humans have been lol