American Eating Disruption Helpline Replaced Hotline Employees with AI-Based Chatbot

National Association for Eating Disorders (NEDA) is the largest non-profit organization in the United States dedicated to the problem of eating disorders ( RPP ), decided to replace the psychological helpline workers with a chatbot named Tessa. This happened exactly four days after some of the employees united in a union to demand better working conditions.

The NEDA Hotline has been in existence for twenty years and has provided support to hundreds of thousands of people via phone, chat and text messages. NEDA employees said they felt overwhelmed due to a lack of operators. The entire line was kept literally by six employees who received calls and messages from all American states.

When employees asked the NEDA administration to recruit new people as well as improve their own working conditions, their demands were ignored. That is why they decided to organize a trade union.

“We didn’t even ask for a pay rise,” she wrote. your blog Abby Harper, one of the hotline workers and a union member. “When NEDA refused to recognize our union, we applied to the National Labor Relations Commission. Four days after our union was approved, the four of us were told we were being fired and replaced with a chatbot.”

NEDA describes Tessa as a “health chatbot” that has been in operation since February last year, so it’s not a new and raw project, it was simply adapted to the needs of the organization. The hotline will cease to exist on June 1, and Tessa’s text chatbot will become the only support system available in NEDA.

A representative of the organization said that Tessa has been tested on 700 volunteers since November 2021 and more than half of them gave the chatbot a 100% usefulness rating. “According to the results of the study, the researchers concluded that Tessa’s success demonstrates the potential benefits of chatbots as a cost-effective, readily available, and non-stigmatizing option for prevention and intervention for eating disorders,” the company said.

The laid-off employees feel that Tessa’s introduction deprives the hotline support of a personal aspect in which many of the employees can speak from their experience. “Some of us have personally recovered from eating disorders, and we brought this invaluable experience into our work,” said Abby Harper.

Although Tessa is not based on large language models, like the same ChatGPTand has a very limited range of answers, the researchers assure that Tessa should do an excellent job with her function.

Moreover, experts are still afraid to use large language models (LLMs) in dealing with mentally depressed people due to the unpredictability of the responses of such models. What is the story about voluntary retirement a Belgian scientist who spent a month and a half corresponding with an advanced LLM-based chatbot.

However, such shifts towards replacing humans with modern technology, even in such sensitive areas as psychology, are slowly confirming the fears of skeptics. They argue that one day AI will take over most of the niches of intellectual work, and the “simple hard workers” will have no other choice but to do hard physical work. Do you believe in such a development of events?