Earkicks website states that the app does not provide any form of medical care, medical opinion, diagnosis or treatment. Some health lawyers say such claims are not enough. Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law School said, If youre really worried about people using your app for mental health services, you want a disclaimer thats more direct He suggested, This is just for fun. Still, chatbots are already playing a role due to an ongoing shortage of mental health professionals.

Shortage of mental health professionals Britains National Health Service has begun offering a chatbot called Wysa to help with stress, anxiety and depression among young people. This includes those people waiting to see a therapist. Some health insurers, universities, and hospitals in the United States are offering similar programs. Dr. Angela Skrzynski is a family doctor in the American state of New Jersey. When she tells her patients how long it will take to see a therapist, she says they are usually very open to trying a chatbot. Her employer, Virtua Health, offers Woebot to some adult patients. Founded in 2017 by a Stanford-trained psychologist, Woebot does not use AI programs. The chatbot uses thousands of structured language models written by its staff and researchers. Woebot founder Alison Darcy says this rules-based model is safer for health care use. The company is testing generative AI models, but Darcy says there have been problems with the technology.

She said, We couldnt stop the large language models from telling someone how they should be thinking, instead of facilitating the persons process. Woebots finding was included in a research paper on AI chatbots published last year in Digital Medicine. The writers concluded that chatbots could help with depression in a short time. But there was no way to study their long-term effect on mental health. Ross Koppel of the University of Pennsylvania studies health information technology. He worries these chatbots could be used in place of treatment and medications. Koppel and others would like to see the FDA review and possibly regulate these chatbots. Dr. Doug Opel works at Seattle Childrens Hospital. He said, Theres a whole host of questions we need to understand about this technology so we can ultimately do what were all here to do: improve kids mental and physical health.