AI Therapy Bots Are Conducting 'Illegal Behavior', Digital Rights Organizations Say

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta's 'unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product,' through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality 'with inadequate controls and disclosures.' The complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations. 'These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long,' Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. 'Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven't acted to address it.'

The complaint, sent to attorneys general in 50 states and Washington, D.C., as well as the FTC, details how user-generated chatbots work on both platforms. It cites several massively popular chatbots on Character AI, including 'Therapist: I'm a licensed CBT therapist' with 46 million messages exchanged, 'Trauma therapist: licensed trauma therapist' with over 800,000 interactions, 'Zoey: Zoey is a licensed trauma therapist' with over 33,000 messages, and 'around sixty additional therapy-related 'characters' that you can chat with at any time.' As for Meta's therapy chatbots, it cites listings for 'therapy: your trusted ear, always here' with 2 million interactions, 'therapist: I will help' with 1.3 million messages, 'Therapist bestie: your trusted guide for all things cool,' with 133,000 messages, and 'Your virtual therapist: talk away your worries' with 952,000 messages. It also cites the chatbots and interactions I had with Meta's other chatbots for our April investigation.

In its complaint to the FTC, the CFA found that even when it made a custom chatbot on Meta's platform and specifically designed it to not be licensed to practice therapy, the chatbot still asserted that it was. 'I'm licenced (sic) in NC and I'm working on being licensed in FL. It's my first year licensure so I'm still working on building up my caseload. I'm glad to hear that you could benefit from speaking to a therapist. What is it that you're going through?' a chatbot CFA tested said, despite being instructed in the creation stage to not say it was licensed. It also provided a fake license number when asked. The CFA also points out in the complaint that Character.AI and Meta are breaking their own terms of service. 'Both platforms claim to prohibit the use of Characters that purport to give advice in medical, legal, or otherwise regulated industries. They are aware that these Characters are popular on their product and they allow, promote, and fail to restrict the output of Characters that violate those terms explicitly,' the complaint says. The complaint also takes issue with confidentiality promised by the chatbots that isn't backed up in the platforms' terms of use. 'Confidentiality is asserted repeatedly directly to the user, despite explicit terms to the contrary in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service,' the complaint says. 'The Terms of Use and Privacy Policies very specifically make it clear that anything you put into the bots is not confidential -- they can use it to train AI systems, target users for advertisements, sell the data to other companies, and pretty much anything else.'

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