Last week the National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) fired all six people staffing its phone-in help line and told the line’s 200 volunteers not to come back because everyone was being replaced by “Tessa”, a chatbot that would guide callers to sources of help. However, almost immediately Neda had to take down it’s artificial intelligence chatbot, after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice.
Tessa almost immediately ran into problems
Activist Sharon Maxwell posted on her Instagram that Tessa had offered her “healthy eating tips” and advice on how to lose weight. The chatbot recommended a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day and weekly weighing and measuring to keep track of weight;
If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today...It is beyond time for Neda to step aside.
Neda itself has reported that those who diet moderately are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, while those who restrict extremely are 18 times more likely to form a disorder. Neda said in a public statement;
It came to our attention last night that the current version of the Tessa Chatbot, running the Body Positivity program, may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program...We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice for a complete investigation.
Nearly 70,000 people last year reached out to a helpline operated by the National Eating Disorders Association. Those numbers had more than doubled during the COVID emergency, and they still haven't returned to pre-pandemic levels. Former helpline employee Abbie Harper said the helpline had seen a 107% increase in calls and messages since the start of the pandemic. Reports of suicidal thoughts, self-harm and child abuse and neglect nearly tripled.
Lauren Smolar, a vice-president at Neda, told NPR in May that the influx of calls reporting serious mental health crises had presented a legal liability to the organization. Stating;
Our volunteers are volunteers. They’re not professionals. They don’t have crisis training. And we really can’t accept that kind of responsibility. We really need them to go to those services who are appropriate.
However, many of these helpline volunteers and staff get into this work because they have recovered from eating disorders themselves. Abbie Harper says that is part of why the helpline is so powerful;
When you know what it's been like for you and you know that feeling, you can connect with others.
In a post on Neda’s website about the chatbot that has since been taken down, Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis who helped develop the chatbot, said that “Tessa” was thought up as a solution to make eating disorder prevention more widely available. She wrote;
Programs that require human time and resources to implement them are difficult to scale...Even though the chatbot was a robot, we thought she could provide some of that motivation, feedback and support … and maybe even deliver our effective program content in a way that would make people really want to engage.
In a statement to the Guardian, Neda’s CEO, Liz Thompson, said that the chatbot was not meant to replace the helpline but was rather created as a separate program.
As it turns out, the news that the six workers were dumped and Tessa would replace them came four days after the six had voted to unionise. Now the union, the Helpline Associates United, has filed a suit alleging unfair labour practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
The union, Harper wrote;
...asked for adequate staffing and ongoing training to keep up with the needs of the hotline...We didn’t even ask for more money...Some of us have personally recovered from eating disorders and bring that invaluable experience to our work. All of us came to this job because of our passion for eating disorders and mental health advocacy and our desire to make a difference.
As the ongoing of encroachment of AI continues shouldn't we be asking ourselves is a chatbot equal to a person?