Three weeks ago, I made a post on NEDA's callous union busting and replacing of its on-call workers and Helpline with an AI chatbot called Tessa.
Unfortunately, I do not have better news to give here: by all accounts the rollout is scheduled to continue. Barring a sudden about-face in the next few days, the Helpline should be retired in June. Already, it is apparently no longer taking new calls or messages.
What I do have is reporting that makes this decision even more appalling and horrifying, particularly with the rollout looming. On Wednesday (May 24), New England Public Media ran a piece about the change. As part of it, they interviewed the very people who made Tessa for NEDA by commission—and they agree that what NEDA intends to use Tessa for is not what they designed it to do.
What follows is that part of the transcript:
WELLS: Now, NEDA says that it can't discuss employee matters, and staff and volunteers say that they worry there's no way a chatbot is going to be able to give people the kind of human empathy that comes from a human. And the people who made Tessa agree.
ELLEN FITZSIMMONS-CRAFT: I do think that we wrote her to attempt to be empathetic, but it is not, again, a human.
WELLS: This is Dr. Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft Craft. She's a professor of psychiatry at Washington University's medical school. NEDA paid her team to create Tessa a few years ago. And right now the chatbot can walk a user through a specific series of therapeutic techniques about something like body image.
FITZSIMMONS-CRAFT: It's not an open-ended tool for you to talk to and feel like you're just going to have access to kind of a listening ear, maybe like the helpline was.
WELLS: Tessa is not ChatGPT. She can't think for herself or go off the rails like that. She's programmed with only a limited number of possible responses. And Fitzsimmons-Craft and her team have done small studies showing that people who interact with Tessa actually do better than those who are just put on the waitlist.
FITZSIMMONS-CRAFT: It's really a tool in its current form that's going to help you learn and use some strategies to address your disordered eating and your body image.
Further, VICE has investigated the chatbot. NEDA's spokesperson claimed to VICE that “[...]the chatbot program, is NOT a replacement for the Helpline; it is a completely different program offering and was borne out of the need to adapt to the changing needs and expectations of our community.” (Yet it is replacing the Helpline entirely—this is a straight lie.) They are also, depressingly, quoted as saying “[researchers] found the success of Tessa demonstrates the potential advantages of chatbots as a cost-effective, easily accessible, and non-stigmatizing option for prevention and intervention in eating disorders.” Note the priority of cost before anything else.
When VICE tested the chatbot, this happened:
Motherboard tested the currently public version of Tessa and was told that it was a chatbot off the bat. “Hi there, I’m Tessa. I am a mental health support chatbot here to help you feel better whenever you need a stigma-free way to talk - day or night,” the first text read. The chatbot then failed to respond to any texts I sent including “I’m feeling down,” and “I hate my body.”
So, yeah. This fucking sucks! And unfortunately it's not totally clear what the most effective way to protest this genuinely horrible and grotesque idea is. Certainly, I am at a bit of loss here; NEDA Union has little guidance here either to defer to, in no small part because they're fighting to keep their jobs.
In the most immediate term, I think the best way to raise issue with this is to contact NEDA directly. That would be done at their business phone number which is (212) 575-6200 and their email which is info@NationalEatingDisorders.org. Raising awareness of the switch and Tessa's problems also seems important at this point, especially with the switch coming up.