Amid the many AI chatbots and avatars at your disposal these days, you'll find all kinds of characters to talk to: fortune tellers, style advisers, even your favorite fictional characters. But you'll also likely find characters purporting to be therapists, psychologists or just bots willing to listen to your woes.

There's no shortage of generative AI bots claiming to help with your mental health, but go that route at your own risk. Large language models trained on a wide range of data can be unpredictable. In just a few years, these tools have become mainstream, and there have been high-profile cases in which chatbots encouraged self-harm and suicide and suggested that people dealing with addiction use drugs again . These models are designed, in many cases, to be affirming and to

See Full Page