Search Results (105)

Background: The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in mental health therapy presents a compelling yet deeply fraught opportunity to address widespread disparities in access to psychological care. Recent empirical evidence reveals that these AI systems exhibit substantial shortcomings when confronted with complex clinical contexts. Methods: This paper synthesizes key findings from a critical analysis of LLMs operating in therapeutic roles and argues for the urgent establishment of comprehensive risk management frameworks, policy interventions, and ethical protocols governing their use. Results: LLMs tested in simulated therapeutic settings frequently exhibited stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health conditions and responded inappropriately to acute clinical symptoms such as suicidal ideation, psychosis, and delusions. Real-world evaluations reinforce these concerns. Some studies found that therapy and companion bots endorsed unsafe or harmful suggestions in adolescent crisis vignettes, while others reported inadequate chatbot responses to self-harm and sexual assault queries, prompting concern from clinicians, disappointment from patients, and calls for stronger oversight from policymakers. These failures contravene fundamental principles of safe clinical practice, including non-maleficence, therapeutic alliance, and evidence-based care. Moreover, LLMs lack the emotional intelligence, contextual grounding, and ethical accountability that underpin the professional responsibilities of human therapists. Their propensity for sycophantic or non-directive responses, driven by alignment objectives rather than clinical efficacy, further undermines their therapeutic utility. Conclusions: This analysis highlights barriers to the replacement of human therapists with autonomous AI systems. It also calls attention to the regulatory vacuum surrounding LLM-based wellness and therapy applications, many of which are widely accessible and unvetted. Recommendations include professional standards, transparency in training and deployment, robust privacy protections, and clinician oversight. The findings underscore the need to redefine AI as supportive, not substitutive. Full article

This study examines the potential of the AI chatbot ChatGPT-4o to support human-centered tasks such as qualitative research analysis. It focuses on a case study involving an initial university teaching training program at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), evaluated through student feedback. The findings indicate that ChatGPT can assist in the qualitative analysis of student assessments by identifying specific issues and suggesting possible solutions. However, expert oversight remains necessary as the tool lacks a full contextual understanding of the actions evaluated. The study concludes that AI systems like ChatGPT offer powerful means to complement complex human-centered tasks and anticipates their growing role in the evaluation of formative programs. By examining ChatGPT’s performance in this context, the study lays the groundwork for prototyping a customized automated system built on the insights gained here, capable of assessing program outcomes and supporting iterative improvements throughout each module, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the quality of the training program Full article

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are characterized by complex challenges in management and optimization, especially in ensuring efficiency, reducing losses, and maintaining infrastructure performances. The recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques based on Large Language Models, particularly ChatGPT 4.0 (a chatbot based on a generative pre-trained model), offer potential solutions to streamline these processes. This study investigates the ability of ChatGPT to perform the clustering phase of WDN partitioning, a critical step for dividing large networks into manageable clusters. Using a real Italian network as a case study, ChatGPT was prompted to apply several clustering algorithms, including k-means, spectral, and hierarchical clustering. The results show that ChatGPT uniquely adds value by automating the entire workflow of WDN clustering—from reading input files and running algorithms to calculating performance indices and generating reports. This makes advanced water network partitioning accessible to users without programming or hydraulic modeling expertise. The study highlights ChatGPT’s role as a complementary tool: it accelerates repetitive tasks, supports decision-making with interpretable outputs, and lowers the entry barrier for utilities and practitioners. These findings demonstrate the practical potential of integrating large language models into water management, where they can democratize specialized methodologies and facilitate wider adoption of WDN managing strategies. Full article

Advances in machine learning have improved the ability to predict critical environmental conditions, including solar radiation levels that, while essential for life, can pose serious risks to human health. In Ecuador, due to its geographical location and altitude, UV radiation reaches extreme levels. This study presents the development of a chatbot system driven by a hybrid artificial intelligence model, combining Random Forest, CatBoost, Gradient Boosting, and a 1D Convolutional Neural Network. The model was trained with meteorological data, optimized using hyperparameters (iterations: 500–1500, depth: 4–8, learning rate: 0.01–0.3), and evaluated through MAE, MSE, R², and F1-Score. The hybrid model achieved superior accuracy (MAE = 13.77 W/m², MSE = 849.96, R² = 0.98), outperforming traditional methods. A 15% error margin was observed without significantly affecting classification. The chatbot, implemented via Telegram and hosted on Heroku, provided real-time personalized alerts, demonstrating an effective, accessible, and scalable solution for health safety and environmental awareness. Furthermore, it facilitates decision-making in the efficient generation of renewable energy and supports a more sustainable energy transition. It offers a tool that strengthens the relationship between artificial intelligence and sustainability by providing a practical instrument for integrating clean energy and mitigating climate change. Full article

Language learners increasingly rely on intelligent digital tools to supplement their learning experiences, yet existing chatbots often provide limited support, lacking adaptability, personalization, or domain-specific intelligence. This study introduces a novel AI-powered multi-agent chatbot architecture designed to support English–Arabic translation and language learning. Developed through a three-phase methodology, offline preparation, real-time deployment, and evaluation, the system employs both retrieval-based and generative AI models, with specialized agents managing tasks such as translation, example retrieval, user translation review, and learning feedback. The chatbot was developed using a hybrid architecture incorporating fine-tuned Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model, sentence embedding techniques, and similarity evaluation metrics. A user study involving 40 undergraduate students and 4 faculty members evaluated the system across usability, effectiveness, and pedagogical value. Results show that the multi-agent chatbot significantly enhanced learner engagement, provided accurate and contextually appropriate language support, and was positively received by both students and instructors. These findings demonstrate the value of multi-agent design in language learning applications and highlight the potential of AI-driven chatbots as intelligent educational assistants. Full article

This paper presents a real-time smart mirror system combining multiple AI modules for multimodal health monitoring. The proposed platform integrates three core components: facial expression analysis, remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), and conversational AI. A key innovation lies in transforming the Moving Average rPPG (MA-rPPG) model—originally developed for offline batch processing—into a real-time, continuously streaming setup, enabling seamless heart rate and peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO₂) monitoring using standard webcams. The system also incorporates the DeepFace facial analysis library for live emotion, age detection, and a Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4o (GPT-4o)-based mental health chatbot with bilingual (English/Korean) support and voice synthesis. Embedded into a touchscreen mirror with Graphical User Interface (GUI), this solution delivers ambient, low-interruption interaction and real-time user feedback. By unifying these AI modules within an interactive smart mirror, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of integrating multimodal sensing (rPPG, affect detection) and conversational AI into a real-time smart mirror platform. This system is presented as a feasibility-stage prototype to promote real-time health awareness and empathetic feedback. The physiological validation was limited to a single subject, and the user evaluation constituted only a small formative assessment; therefore, results should be interpreted strictly as preliminary feasibility evidence. The system is not intended to provide clinical diagnosis or generalizable accuracy at this stage. Full article

Educational institutions commonly receive numerous student requests regarding various services. Given the large population of students in a college, it becomes extremely overwhelming for the staff to address the inquiries of all the students while dealing with multiple administrative tasks at the same time. Furthermore, students often make multiple visits to the university’s administration, make multiple calls, or write emails about their concerns, which makes it difficult to respond to their queries promptly. AI-powered chatbots can act as virtual assistants that promptly help students in addressing their simple and complex queries. Most of the research work has focused on chatbots supporting the English language, and significant improvement is needed for implementing chatbots in the Arabic language. Existing studies supporting the Arabic language have either employed rule-based models or built custom deep learning models for chatbots. Rule-based models lack understanding of diverse contexts, whereas custom-built deep learning models, besides needing huge datasets for effective training, are difficult to integrate with other platforms. In this work, we leverage the services offered by IBM Watson to develop a chatbot that assists university students in both English and Arabic. IBM Watson employs natural language understanding and deep learning techniques to build a robust dialog and offers a more scalable, integrable, and customizable solution for enterprises. The chatbot not only provides information about the university’s general services but also customizes its response based on the individual needs of the students. The chatbot has been deployed at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), Oman, and tested by the university’s staff and students. User testing shows that the chatbot achieves promising results. This first bilingual AI chatbot at SQU supports English and Arabic and offers secure, personalized services via OTP and student email verification. SQUbot delivers both general and individualized academic support. Pilot testing showed 84.9% intent recognition accuracy. Most unidentified queries were due to dialectal variation or out-of-scope inputs, which were addressed through fallback prompts and dataset refinement. Full article

A learning management system (LMS) plays a crucial role in supporting students’ educational activities by centralized platforms for course delivery, communication, and student support. Recently, many universities have integrated chatbots into their LMS to assist students with various inquiries and tasks. However, existing chatbots often necessitate human interventions to manually respond to complex queries, resulting in limited scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we present a memory-augmented large language model (LLM) framework that enhances the reasoning and contextual continuity of LMS-based chatbots. The proposed framework first embeds user queries and retrieves semantically relevant entries from various LMS resources, including instructional documents and academic frequently asked questions. Retrieved entries are then filtered through a two-stage confidence filtering process that combines similarity thresholds and LLM-based semantic validation. Validated information, along with user queries, is processed by LLM for response generation. To maintain coherence in multi-turn interactions, the chatbot incorporates short-term, long-term, and temporal event memories, which track conversational flow and personalize responses based on user-specific information, such as recent activity history and individual preferences. To evaluate response quality, we employed a multi-layered evaluation strategy combining BERTScore-based quantitative measurement, an LLM-as-a-Judge approach for automated semantic assessment, and a user study under multi-turn scenarios. The evaluation results consistently confirm that the proposed framework improves the consistency, clarity, and usefulness of the responses. These findings highlight the potential of memory-augmented LLMs for scalable and intelligent learning support within university environments. Full article

There is minimal research concerning the role of custom-trained artificial intelligence (AI) tools in higher education, with a lack of research concerning the pedagogical qualities of an AI-based personal tutor. To fill this literature gap, we examined how a custom GPT personal tutor shapes key teaching and learning qualities. Using the mixed-methods approach, we aimed to demonstrate preliminary and exploratory empirical evidence concerning the contribution of custom-trained AI tutors to building up students’ competencies. Our research analyzed the subjective assessments of students related to the GPT tutor’s contribution to improving their competencies. Both the qualitative and quantitative empirical results confirmed the positive contribution. In addition, we triangulated the results to evaluate the potential of custom-trained AI chatbots in higher education, focusing on undergraduate business courses. However, the results of this study cannot be generalized to the entire student population of business schools, since the participation in the AI-assisted tutor program was voluntary, attracting only intrinsically motivated students. Full article

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) provide a computationally cheaper approach for text generation compared to large language models (LLMs). The low hardware barrier of training GANs poses a threat because it means more bad actors may use them to mass-produce prompt attack messages against LLM systems. Thus, to better understand the threat of GANs being used for prompt attack generation, we train two well-known GAN architectures, SeqGAN and RelGAN, on prompt attack messages. For each architecture, we evaluate generated prompt attack messages, comparing results with each other, with generated attacks from another computationally cheap approach, a 1-billion-parameter Llama 3.2 small language model (SLM), and with messages from the original dataset. This evaluation suggests that GAN architectures like SeqGAN and RelGAN have the potential to be used in conjunction with SLMs to readily generate malicious prompts that impose new threats against LLM-based systems such as chatbots. Analyzing the effectiveness of state-of-the-art defenses against prompt attacks, we also find that GAN-generated attacks can deceive most of these defenses with varying levels of success with the exception of Meta’s PromptGuard. Further, we suggest an improvement of prompt attack defenses based on the analysis of the language quality of the prompts, which we found to be the weakest point of GAN-generated messages. Full article

As the global population ages, older adults face growing psychological challenges such as loneliness, cognitive decline, and loss of social roles. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including chatbots and voice-based systems, offer new pathways to emotional support and mental stimulation. However, older adults often encounter significant barriers in accessing and effectively using AI tools. This review examines the current landscape of AI applications aimed at enhancing psychological well-being among older adults, identifies key challenges such as digital literacy and usability, and highlights design and training strategies to bridge the digital divide. Using socioemotional selectivity theory and technology acceptance models as guiding frameworks, we argue that AI—especially in the form of conversational agents—holds transformative potential in reducing isolation and promoting emotional resilience in aging populations. We conclude with recommendations for inclusive design, participatory development, and future interdisciplinary research. Full article

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly utilized to perform tasks requiring human intelligence, patients who are pregnant may turn to AI for advice on over-the-counter (OTC) medications. However, medications used in pregnancy may pose profound safety concerns limited by data availability. This study focuses on a chatbot’s ability to accurately provide information regarding OTC medications as it relates to patients that are pregnant. A prospective, descriptive design was used to compare the responses generated by the Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3.5 (ChatGPT-3.5) to the information provided by UpToDate^®. Eighty-seven of the top pharmacist-recommended OTC drugs in the United States (U.S.) as identified by Pharmacy Times were assessed for safe use in pregnancy using ChatGPT-3.5. A piloted, standard prompt was input into ChatGPT-3.5, and the responses were recorded. Two groups independently rated the responses compared to UpToDate on their correctness, completeness, and safety using a 5-point Likert scale. After independent evaluations, the groups discussed the findings to reach a consensus, with a third independent investigator giving final ratings. For correctness, the median score was 5 (interquartile range [IQR]: 5–5). For completeness, the median score was 4 (IQR: 4–5). For safety, the median score was 5 (IQR: 5–5). Despite high overall scores, the safety errors in 9% of the evaluations (n = 8), including omissions that pose a risk of serious complications, currently renders the chatbot an unsafe standalone resource for this purpose. Full article

Background/Objectives: In recent years, the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence models, such as ChatGPT (version of 29 April 2024), have prompted interest from numerous domains of medicine, such as ophthalmology. As such, research is necessary to further assess its potential while simultaneously evaluating its shortcomings. Our study thus evaluates ChatGPT-4’s performance on the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s (AAO) Basic and Clinical Science Course (BCSC) Self-Assessment Program, focusing on its image recognition capabilities and its enhancement with domain-specific pretraining. Methods: The chatbot was tested on 1300 BCSC Self-Assessment Program questions, including text and image-based questions. Domain-specific pretraining was tested for performance improvements. The primary outcome was the model’s accuracy when presented with text and image-based multiple choice questions. Logistic regression and post hoc analyzes examined performance variations by question difficulty, image presence, and subspecialties. Results: The chatbot achieved an average accuracy of 78% compared with the average test-taker score of 74%. The repeatability kappa was 0.85 (95% CI: 0.82–0.87). Following domain-specific pretraining, the model’s overall accuracy increased to 85%. The accuracy of the model’s responses first depends on question difficulty (LR = 366), followed by image presence (LR = 108) and exam section (LR = 79). Conclusions: The chatbot appeared to be similar or superior to human trainee test takers in ophthalmology, even with image recognition questions. Domain-specific training appeared to have improved accuracy. While these results do not necessarily imply that the chatbot has the comprehensive skill level of a human ophthalmologist, the results suggest there may be educational value to these tools if additional investigations provide similar results. Full article

The growing prevalence of AI chatbots in everyday life has prompted educators to explore their potential applications in promoting student success, including support for classroom engagement and communication. This exploratory study emerged from semester-long observations of class participation apprehensions in an introductory educational psychology course, examining how chatbots might scaffold students toward active and independent classroom contribution. Four students experiencing situational participation anxiety voluntarily participated in a pilot intervention using AI chatbots as virtual peer partners. Following comprehensive training in AI use and prompt design given to the entire class, participants employed systematic consultation frameworks for managing classroom discourse trepidations. Data collection involved regular instructor meetings documenting student experiences, challenges, and developmental trajectories through qualitative analysis emphasizing contextual interpretation. While students reported general satisfaction with chatbot integration, implementation revealed three critical complexities: temporal misalignment between AI consultation and real-time discussion dynamics; feedback inflation creating disconnects between AI reassurance and classroom reception; and unintended progression from supportive scaffolding toward technological dependency. Individual outcomes varied, with some students developing independence while others increased reliance on external validation. AI-assisted participation interventions demonstrate both promise and limitations, requiring careful consideration of classroom dynamics. Effective implementation necessitates rehearsal-based rather than validation-focused applications, emphasizing human mentorship and community-centered approaches that preserve educational autonomy while leveraging technological scaffolding strategically. Full article

A persistent challenge in training future philology educators is engaging students in deep textual analysis across historical periods—especially in large classes where limited resources, feedback, and assessment tools hinder the teaching of complex linguistic and contextual features. These constraints often lead to superficial learning, decreased motivation, and inequitable outcomes, particularly when traditional methods lack interactive and scalable support. As digital technologies evolve, there is increasing interest in how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can address such instructional gaps. This study explores the potential of conversational AI chatbots to provide scalable, pedagogically grounded support in philology education. Using a mixed-methods case study, twenty-six (n = 26) undergraduate students completed structured tasks using one of three AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected via usability scales, AI literacy surveys, and semi-structured interviews. The results showed strong usability across all platforms, with DeepSeek rated highest in intuitiveness. Students reported confidence in using AI for efficiency and decision-making but desired greater support in evaluating multiple AI-generated outputs. The AI-enhanced environment promoted motivation, autonomy, and conceptual understanding, despite some onboarding and clarity challenges. Implications include reducing instructor workload, enhancing student-centered learning, and informing curriculum development in philology, particularly for instructional designers and educational technologists. Full article