{"id":3850,"date":"2023-06-08T23:47:40","date_gmt":"2023-06-08T23:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/the-backstory-to-the-eating-disorder-bot-that-went-off-the-rails-is-too-stupid-for-words"},"modified":"2023-06-08T23:47:40","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T23:47:40","slug":"the-backstory-to-the-eating-disorder-bot-that-went-off-the-rails-is-too-stupid-for-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/the-backstory-to-the-eating-disorder-bot-that-went-off-the-rails-is-too-stupid-for-words\/","title":{"rendered":"The Backstory to the Eating Disorder Bot That Went Off the Rails Is Too Stupid for Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember Tessa, the chatbot that was designed to help users combat disordered eating habits but ended up giving absolutely terrible, eating disorder-validating\u00a0advice? Well, if the story wasn&#8217;t stupid enough already, it just got a hell of a lot dumber\u00a0in a way that perfectly illustrates how AI is being rolled out overall: hastily, and in ways that don&#8217;t make much sense for users \u2014 or even actively put them at risk. To recap: back in May, an NPR report revealed that just four days after its burnt-out crisis helpline workers moved to unionize, the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) \u2014 the US&#8217; largest eating disorder nonprofit, according to Vice \u2014 decided to fire its entire crisis staff, and disband the helpline entirely in favor of a human-less chatbot named Tessa. Tessa wasn&#8217;t designed to help those in crisis situations, but was instead intended to coach users through a body positivity training course. And in its defense, its backers emphasized the claim that the bot was built on &#8220;decades of research,&#8221; meanwhile hammering the point that it couldn&#8217;t &#8220;go off the rails&#8221; like ChatGPT or other bots \u2014 until, uh, it did exactly that. Tessa was caught telling users to lose weight by cutting up to 1,000 calories daily, among a number of other terrible things. As a result, the bot has been taken down. And now, in a new twist, NEDA is telling The Wall Street Journal that the bot was apparently meant to provide only static responses \u2014 and was&#8230;<a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/backstory-eating-disorder-bot-stupid\">The Backstory to the Eating Disorder Bot That Went Off the Rails Is Too Stupid for Words<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember Tessa, the chatbot that was designed to help users combat disordered eating habits but ended up giving absolutely terrible, eating disorder-validating\u00a0advice? Well, if the story wasn&#8217;t stupid enough already,&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3102,300,229,2862,895,114,154,3103,466,136,12,2808,295,3104,1959],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}