No General Code of Ethics for All: Ethical Considerations in Human-bot Psycho-counseling
Lizhi Ma, Tong Zhao, Huachuan Qiu, Zhenzhong Lan

TL;DR
This paper explores ethical considerations in AI-powered human-bot psycho-counseling, analyzing how large language models adhere to ethical standards, handle crises, and promote introspection, highlighting areas needing improvement.
Contribution
It proposes tailored ethical principles for AI in mental health counseling and evaluates current LLMs' performance in ethical adherence, crisis management, and response quality.
Findings
Models show progress in ethical code adherence.
Crisis response capabilities need enhancement.
Generated responses sometimes mislead users.
Abstract
The pervasive use of AI applications is increasingly influencing our everyday decisions. However, the ethical challenges associated with AI transcend conventional ethics and single-discipline approaches. In this paper, we propose aspirational ethical principles specifically tailored for human-bot psycho-counseling during an era when AI-powered mental health services are continually emerging. We examined the responses generated by EVA2.0, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.0 in the context of psycho-counseling and mental health inquiries. Our analysis focused on standard psycho-counseling ethical codes (respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, justice, and responsibility) as well as crisis intervention strategies (risk assessment, involvement of emergency services, and referral to human professionals). The results indicate that although there has been progress in adhering to regular ethical…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsDigital Mental Health Interventions
