AI Predicts Mental Health Episodes Through Social Media
Researchers use AI social media analysis to gain âbehavioral insightsâ for people with bipolar disorder. The intention is to enable early intervention and personalized treatment; however, this comes with privacy concerns. Someone I love dearly has bipolar disorder, and it can be debilitating. I imagine these programs could potentially be used to target mental health patients with social media ads, a dangerous thing for individuals with disorders, like bipolar, featuring manic, impulsive spending habits. Other potential concerns would be the ability to sell these findings to insurance companies, which might use the information for nefarious purposes. I would say this is unlikely to happen, but many things that were previously considered improbable are now occurring. I imagine that data could potentially be sold to companies looking for a reason to fire individuals with mental health disorders by "proving" things like instability or poor money management, regardless of a perfect work record (This type of discrimination would violate the ADA, but one would need proof that that was the cause for dismissal). Perhaps the main question is whether the benefits outweigh the risksâan important consideration when it comes to AI.