Can ChatGPT be your therapist?
AI chatbots can reduce anxiety and depression, according to recent research. As chatbot therapy goes mainstream, can it replace a real therapeutic relationship?
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Al Jazeera
5 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Can ChatGPT be your therapist?
AI chatbots can reduce anxiety and depression, according to recent research. As chatbot therapy goes mainstream, can it replace a real therapeutic relationship?
Qatar Tribune
8 hours ago
- Qatar Tribune
Beyond the internet: AI learning from 15th-century texts
Agencies Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artistsand others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes 'all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated $50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'' Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language,' said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.'
Al Jazeera
12 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Supreme Court upholds Tennessee law barring gender-affirming care for youth
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a Tennessee law barring puberty blockers and hormone therapies for transgender minors does not violate the US Constitution and can therefore remain in effect. Wednesday's decision was split along ideological lines, with the high court's six conservative judges siding with Tennessee and its three left-leaning judges joining together for a dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority. In it, he explained that the plaintiffs — three transgender minors, their parents and a doctor — had not successfully shown a violation of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. The plaintiffs had sought to lift the ban, arguing that Tennessee's law, known as SB1, discriminated against them based on their sex and gender. Roberts, however, disagreed. He pointed out that the ban applies to young men and women equally. 'SB1 does not mask sex-based classifications,' he wrote. 'The law does not prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other. Under SB1, no minor may be administered puberty blockers or hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence.' Roberts also noted that puberty blockers continue to be available under the Tennessee law to treat congenital defects, early puberty, disease or injury among children. That application likewise was allowed regardless of sex, he wrote. 'SB1 does not exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status but rather removes one set of diagnoses — gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence — from the range of treatable conditions,' Roberts said. Transgender youth are sometimes prescribed hormone inhibitors to delay the onset of puberty, thereby stopping the development of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts, deepening voices and facial hair. LGBTQ advocates say such gender-affirming care is essential in some cases to alleviate the stress of such changes and reduce the potential need for surgeries later on. Puberty blockers are widely considered to be safe and their effects temporary. But Roberts noted that some medical providers are pushing for more research into the long-term effects of the drugs and pointing to 'open questions' in the medical field. 'Health authorities in a number of European countries have raised significant concerns regarding the potential harms associated with using puberty blockers and hormones to treat transgender minors,' Roberts wrote. 'Recent developments only underscore the need for legislative flexibility in this area,' he continued. The majority's opinion was met by a fierce dissent, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She pointed out that puberty blockers can save lives, given that transgender youth face higher rates of suicide, self-harm and bullying. 'The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise, inexplicably declaring it must uphold Tennessee's categorical ban on lifesaving medical treatment so long as 'any reasonably conceivable state of facts' might justify it,' Sotomayor wrote. 'By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.' She emphasised that the consensus in the US medical community is that puberty blockers are 'appropriate and medically necessary' in cases of a comprehensive and clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. 'Transgender adolescents' access to hormones and puberty blockers (known as gender-affirming care) is not a matter of mere cosmetic preference,' Sotomayor said. 'To the contrary, access to care can be a question of life or death.' She questioned why Tennessee lawmakers should have the power to regulate a medical decision — and why puberty blockers could still be used to address issues like unwanted facial hair among teenage girls but not gender affirmation among transgender youth. 'Tennessee's ban applies no matter what the minor's parents and doctors think, with no regard for the severity of the minor's mental health conditions or the extent to which treatment is medically necessary for an individual child,' Sotomayor said. Wednesday's decision comes at a precarious time for the transgender community in the US. Since returning to office for a second term in January, US President Donald Trump has taken steps to limit the rights of transgender people. On his very first day back in the White House, the Republican leader issued an executive order announcing the federal government would only recognise two sexes, male and female. Days later, on January 27, he issued another executive order, effectively setting the stage for a ban on transgender troops in the military. Trump denounced transgender people as 'expressing a false 'gender identity'' and said their identity 'conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle'. The Supreme Court upheld that ban as well. June 6 marked an initial deadline for transgender troops to self-identify and leave the military voluntarily. In addition, Trump has said his administration will withhold federal funds from schools that allow transgender girls and women to participate in women's sports. That decision has led to clashes with states like Maine, where Democratic Governor Janet Mills has pledged to stand up to Trump. The fight over Tennessee's ban on puberty blockers arrives amid a wave of similar legislation: According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), some 25 states have bans on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. The group estimates that those laws leave around 100,000 transgender minors without access to medical care they may need. The ban the Supreme Court weighed on Wednesday had initially faced an injunction from a lower court, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction pending an appeal. The ACLU called the Supreme Court's decision a setback but pledged to continue filing legal challenges. In a statement, it noted that the Supreme Court had not overturned the wider precedent that discriminating against transgender people is illegal. 'Today's ruling is a devastating loss for transgender people, our families, and everyone who cares about the Constitution,' said Chase Strangio, a co-director for the ACLU's LGBTQ and HIV Project. 'We are as determined as ever to fight for the dignity and equality of every transgender person.'
