A new Stanford University study found that AI "therapist" chatbots contribute to harmful mental health stigmas and react in outright dangerous ways to users exhibiting hallmark signs of severe crises, including suicidality and schizophrenia-related psychosis and delusion. The yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, which was published today on the pre-print server ArXiv, comes as therapy has exploded as a widespread use case for large language model-powered AI chatbots. Therapy isn't accessible to everyone, and there aren't enough therapists to meet demand; people, especially young ones, are increasingly turning to emotive, human-like bots ranging from OpenAI's general-use chatbot ChatGPT to "therapist" personas hosted on […]