Holly Kuhl

I don't think it's currently all that clear for somebody that would like some support at four in the morning to know whether or not the product that they've happened to stumble upon on an app store is going to be helpful.

AI is something we've been cognizant of for a while, but I do think that the emergence of technologies has probably maybe thought that people have suddenly enabled us to kind of bring it into scope, but it has always been a consideration.

It has always had a regulatory framework around it.

It's just the kind of awareness of that has perhaps been low to middling up until recent years.

So there is a specific challenge with AI.

And that is inherently in its design, in what it does.

And that we can't always evidence how it's made, the decision it's made, or the outcome that it's come to, or the content that it's spat out in a particular scenario.

So that presents inherent challenges in...

the way in which you evidence what a product does and how it does it.

There are therabots or therapist chatbots that are constrained to models which can provide reliable, credible responses to prompts because they've been evidenced to do so.

They have specific restrictive guardrails in place and they are trained on clinical data sets.

There are others that range up to those that, as I mentioned, are maybe just trained on data from the internet.

No real clinical grounding in the data that's being used or the responses.

And it's kind of just running wild.

A user needs to know what product they are using, in all honesty.

And putting it very simply,

I don't think it's currently all that clear for somebody that would like some support at four in the morning to know whether or not the product that they've happened to stumble upon on an app store is going to be helpful.

And when I say helpful, I mean helpful in a way that would replicate a clinical response to distress because

There's a reason why mental health professionals exist.

There's a reason why the mental health system is in place and it's to provide helpful clinical responses to distress and to mental health symptoms that could rapidly deteriorate.