Chatbots, Therapy, and Artificial Intimacy
This session, featuring Dr. Vered Shwartz, examines the increasing use of AI chatbots for emotional support and therapeutic interaction.
Conversational AI systems are now widely used as informal therapists, offering advice, companionship, and emotional reassurance. As people spend more time interacting with these systems, many develop forms of familiarity and attachment that resemble social relationships. These interactions raise difficult questions about the psychological effects of AI companionship and the ethical responsibilities of developers. This discussion will explore:
The risks associated with deploying AI chatbots in mental health contexts
How emotional attachment and perceived intimacy with AI systems complicate questions of responsibility and accountability
The limits of current regulatory and safety frameworks for AI systems providing therapeutic or counseling functions
The reading group brings together UBC students from all academic levels with faculty members to engage collectively with scholarship in AI policy. No prior technical background in AI or policy is required.
Dr. Vered Shwartz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. Her research focuses on natural language processing, machine commonsense reasoning, and the social impacts of AI systems. Shwartz studies how language models reason about everyday situations, how they encode social knowledge, and how people interact with conversational AI. Her work has examined the ways AI systems simulate understanding, generate advice, and shape human perceptions through language based interaction. Before joining UBC, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Her research has been published in leading NLP and AI venues including ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL.