Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

About 1 in every 8 U.S. teenagers and young adults turns to artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots for mental health advice, a new study says.

AI bots offer a cheap and immediate ear for younger people's concerns, worries and woes, researchers wrote in JAMA Network Open. However, it's not clear that these programs are up to the challenge, researchers warned.

"There are few standardized benchmarks for evaluating mental health advice offered by AI chatbots, and there is limited transparency about the datasets that are used to train these large language models," investigator Jonathan Cantor said in a news release. He's a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

The new study follows on a report that OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to delusions and suicide, according to The Associated Press.