Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech): Conversational AI and Mental Health

Conversational AI is increasingly being used as a source of emotional support, even though general-purpose chatbots were never designed for that purpose. Concerns about AI's mental health impact, up to and including suicides, have moved onto the public policy agenda. Munmun De Choudhury, who has been studying the intersection of digital technology and mental health longer than almost anyone, walks through what researchers know, what they don't, and why the answers keep moving. 

The conversation centers on the difficulty of governing technologies whose capabilities and patterns of use are both changing every few weeks. De Choudhury invokes the cautionary tale of Google Flu Trends as a warning: any framework that assumes user behavior is fixed will eventually break. She argues that the harms and benefits of conversational AI are not just person-dependent but task-dependent, which makes general-purpose chatbots fundamentally harder to evaluate than the narrow medical AI systems researchers built for decades. She lays out a multi-stakeholder agenda to address AI's mental health risks, and argues that foundation models need to take into account principles from psychotherapy. 

Dr. Munmun De Choudhury is the J.Z. Liang Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where she founded and directs the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab (SocWeB). She is one of the most cited researchers in digital mental health and is widely credited with pioneering the computational use of social media data to study mental health outcomes. She co-leads the Patient-Centered Care Delivery research pillar at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center, serves on the advisory board for the Australian government's eSafety panel, and was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy in 2024. Her honors include the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award and the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award. 

Transcript

Benefits and Harms of Large Language Models in Digital Mental Health

From Lived Experience to Insight: Unpacking the Psychological Risks of Using AI Conversational Agents