Artificial intelligence will be one of the major issues in the upcoming session of the Virginia General Assembly.
Are AI chatbots about to replace licensed therapists? Not if Delegate Michelle Maldonado of Prince William County has anything to say about it. She has a bill that would put limitations on what an artificial intelligence chatbot can say in a therapeutic setting.
"We don't want to have chatbots taking the place of human therapists, holding themselves out as being the therapists, providing the same kind of information and counseling that a human would," Maldonado says.
Becky Bowers-Lanier is a health care advocate who says Maldonado's bill is needed to make sure that licensed humans are not replaced by unlicensed chatbots.
"I'm concerned about empathy and being able to analyze not only just the verbal behavior that comes out of the individual as they are going through their therapeutic session, but the non-verbal analysis," Bowers-Lanier says. "It's just kind of blowing my mind."
Maldonado has another bill to clarify that AI chatbots cannot be licensed as therapists; one of many bills expected next year to crack down on the rapidly growing field of AI.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
