AI is coming: How to use AI in your psychology or therapy practice in 2023

The Business of Psychology

AI is coming: How to use AI in your psychology or therapy practice in 2023

Today we are going to be talking all about AI and its potential to help us in our work. I am very keen to try and embrace the potential of this technology rather than just getting scared by it and I think it has possible applications for psychologists and therapists that go far beyond the churning out of boring social media posts so I'm looking forward to diving into that. We are going to look at how AI can be used in marketing, admin, report writing, research and as part of the therapy process itself.

Race in Therapy Workshop

Before we get started today I wanted to mention that we have a workshop coming up on 13th July. It is hosted by Kaemotherapy and is all about Race in Therapy, how we can support clients of colour and make sure our practices are part of the changes that need to happen in mental health in the UK. There are only ten spaces available so visit Race in Therapy Workshop to secure your place on the live training.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links & References:

Episode 34: What you should be blogging about: Choosing topics and titles for your psychology blog

Human Behaviour-Change Project Webinar Series (YouTube)

Wellcome Open Research: The Human Behaviour-Change Project: An artificial intelligence system to answer questions about changing behaviour

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

Is AI useful for marketing?

I tested two products:

• ChatGPT - for text stuff (blog posts, podcast episodes, social media captions)
• DALL·E 2 - images generator

The dangers?

It produces super boring stuff that sounds good but has no original thought as there is no capability for original thought. Please (for the love of god) don't get it to write you 50 quotes about the benefits of mindfulness and churn one out each week. We will all die of boredom and it will be a waste of your time.

The opportunities?

It can rewrite content you have already created into other formats, for example I asked it to split a book chapter I have written down into three blog posts and it did a brilliant job of pulling out the key points and creating short blog posts. However, it also erased all my jokes and stories from the chapter when it created the blog posts therefore making them pretty bland. This could be OK if the aim of your blog was just to improve SEO on your website, however if you want to develop relationships with potential clients or spark enthusiasm or interest in real people then AI is not going to do that for you. For someone like me, I could use AI as a starting point to make sure I don't miss out any factual information in my blog post when I am adapting one of my book chapters, but I will still need to go in and make it interesting for the reader. So I think it will make my life easier, but perhaps it isn't the answer to everything.

I also asked chat GPT to create some social media posts based on an email I sent to my email list last week. This was a test for it as the email was essentially a story with a learning point attached to it, so I thought it might not be able to handle it at all but actually it did quite well. The email was about hearing my daughter's class spontaneously burst into God save the King while on the carpet at school and thinking what a great job the royals had done at marketing themselves to the audience that really matters to them - not us, but our kids. Here are the posts it generated (complete with emojis and hashtags)

• Post 1: 🎶 "God saaaaaave our Kiiiiiiiing" 🎶 The power of effective marketing! Discover how the coronation became a memorable, authoritative, and clear message that captured the hearts of our children. Lessons to learn for your own brand. Stand out, be confident, and make your mark! #EffectiveMarketing #StandOutFromTheCrowd
• Post 2: 🤴🏻👑 The Coronation: Marketing Genius! 👑🤴🏻 Millennials might be apathetic, but our kids are embracing the monarchy with fervour! Find out how the royals nailed the three secret ingredients of marketing: being memorable, authoritative, and clear. What can you learn from their success? #MarketingGenius #MemorableAuthority #ClearMessage
• Post 3: 📣 Lessons from the Royals: Effective Marketing 101 📣 The coronation took the country by storm and left a lasting impact. Discover the power of being memorable, authoritative, and clear in your marketing strategy. Don't compromise these key principles! Embrace your authority and tell your audience what you stand for. #EffectiveMarketing #BeMemorable #StandOut

I could use those with a bit of tweaking to make them funnier and less exclamatory and of course I would want to add a call to action (like listen to this podcast or sign up to get my hilarious and useful emails!)

Finally and most frighteningly, I asked chat GPT to create THIS podcast episode using this title. And it did a ridiculously good job. It was engaging, interesting and well structured. The only problem? It featured an interview with an entirely made up doctor, Dr Ramierez.... This led me down a rabbit hole of discovery and I found out that because of the way the algorithm works AI can hallucinate content that is plausible but not real, like the lovely doctor, and there is no distinction between the stuff it creates and the real information. So we definitely can't trust it to create content yet. However I think using it to tweak existing content or provide a structure for something you are planning on creating could be a real time saver and well worth investigating further. For example, maybe I could use it to plan the bullet points for the training on finance in private practice I am running for the BPS, I think there is a good chance it will know what the most important points to cover are and may well sequence them better than I would.

Images wise I tried Canva’s image generator first and it was AWFUL. The idea is nice as you just type in text and it creates an image but as soon as I asked for people it became creepy. Take a look at my insta for some horrible examples. So then I did some research and found that DALL-E is supposedly the best so I tried that. This was more interesting to me as it does the text to image generation but you can also use it to generate images based on one you already have. So I asked it to create some alternative images using a photo of me. I was hoping it would put me on a sun lounger rather than at a desk or something but what it actually did was horrifying. It basically created other versions of me that look like my cousins. Just not something the world needs. Then I tried to get it to create podcast artwork based on the Business of Psychology podcast and it spat out utter gibberish. Then I asked it for a multicoloured pixelated brain and it came up with something that fits the brief but was really badly edited so parts of the image were cut off. If you want to see what I created please do take a look at my instagram, I will add them as a temporary story highlight so you can all appreciate the horror without it making my feed too alarming. They all made me feel a bit sick!

All in all my image experiments with AI make me want to leave it alone for quite some time. I am sure you could learn to make it work much better than that but if I was going to invest the time in doing that surely I would be better off just creating the image myself? Not a fan as you can tell!

So the upshot for me is I don't think we can use AI to do the creative work for us but we can get it to do some of the boring aspects of content creation like repurposing the fun stuff we enjoyed writing into twitter or instagram friendly snippets. I for one intend to embrace that. Similarly, if you are someone who fears the empty page / blinking cursor of doom then you could use chat GPT to give you a framework that you add to for your content for anything from blogs, workshop outlines to project proposals.

Can AI help with Admin in our practices?

It can create letter/email templates which can speed up admin for us but again you will need to tweak them to be happy with them. It can also help with writing some of the boring but needed stuff on your website like the FAQs.

Could AI be useful for report writing & synthesising evidence for research?

Watch fascinating webinars on this subject:

Human Behaviour-Change Project Webinar Series (YouTube)

Work being done on this area:

Wellcome Open Research: The Human Behaviour-Change Project: An artificial intelligence system to answer questions about changing behaviour

Could it be useful for matching clients and therapists?

I can see the benefits of using AI for 24/7 triage of clients but I draw the line at any pretend human-like conversations. I've heard people talking about AI counselling for example and I hate it. To me it isn't ethical as vulnerable people could be deceived and even if it is not deceptive I think the value of a listening service is largely about being understood in a non-judgemental way and this can't be offered by AI as it doesn't have empathy. But that is just my opinion and lots of people disagree with me.

Overall I think we need to get excited about AI and embrace the bits of it that can help us reach more people but I also think we need some wider oversight of the adoption of AI. I'd be very supportive of a government committee dedicated to analysing its adoption potential and risks and providing guidance and I think a version of that from the BPS and HCPC would be very welcome too.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this topic and the outcomes of any experiments you have been doing with AI so do come and find me on Instagram @rosiegilderthorp and let me know how you feel about AI.