BrainWise, Generative AI and ChatGPT

Alberta, Canada Psychologist Gary Brayton, Ph.D. was introduced to BrainWise twelve years ago and has tirelessly recruited and trained educators and health providers throughout the province to teach the program in schools, health facilities and on indigenous reservations. (More about Gary Brayton and Hull Services)

This issue features Gary’s protégé, counselor Colton Hok. Like Gary, Colton said he found “tremendous success with BrainWise.” He said the changes he saw in clients “were really impactful and made me aware of its value.”

More such sites will be added, but the process is slow and thousands of students and families in the province will never learn BrainWise. This service gap makes recent advances in technology a valuable resource to help reach them.

BrainWise, Generative AI and ChatGPT. 

Colton was excited when I talked with him about adding BrainWise to generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) and Chatbots to expand our reach. He offered to delve into the technology and help find information that would help us use technology to get the 10 Wise Ways to more people. “I have seen so much success with BrainWise and now I am in a position to promote it.” 

He followed up on a January, 2024 BBC article that I shared with him: “Young people turning to AI therapist bots.” It talks about the ChatGPT platform launched by gen AI in November, 2022, and explained that it offfers users informative, responses generated by bots that were eerily human[1]. The platform’s users are primarily 16-30-year-olds who quickly contacted the 475 domains (and growing) the platform provides. For a monthly $20 subscription, they had access to millions of bot characters based on real or fictional people they could talk to about a limitless range of topics.

[1] A bot -- short for robot and also called an internet bot -- is a computer program that operates as an agent for a user or other program or to simulate a human activity. They can run without specific instructions from humans.

The article said the ChatGPT platform had one platform that was used above all others, called Psychologist.ai. Its bot is described as “someone who helps with life’s difficulties” and it received 78 million messages from November, 2022 to January, 2023. Eighteen million messages were received during November and December. 

Psycholgist.ai was launched by Sam Zaia, Ph.D., a thirty-year-old psychologist from New Zealand. He said he created the bot for himself and his friends to use when they needed “someone to talk to” about depression, anxiety, and other common issues. No one expected it would attract a tsunami of young users, but its use makes sense and underscores people’s need for help. It also raises red flags about providing users with helpful vs.harmful information. 

As quickly as AI and Chatbots have appeared, so has scientific research that addresses these concerns. Unresolved issues include unhealthy relationships between bots and users, and bots giving inaccurate, inappropriate and unsafe information, but researchers found the benefits far outweigh the downsides. It was clear that users need to use the 10 Wise Ways to reap benefits from AI and Chatbots. 

He found that access was simple, and the chatbot asked him appropriate questions such as, “Have you thought about what might be causing this?” and “Have you talked with anyone else about this?” He found that the bot logically broke things down and was easy to talk to, the back-and-forth was comfortable, and it showed interest in helping him.  

The team discussed how the BrainWise problem solving process, concepts, and terms could enhance both the answers and help users understand how to apply thinking the 10 Wise Ways to prevent and manage problems. Everyone agreed that a generative AI bot could help them identify the many ways BrainWise.ai can help help us reach and teach individuals to stop and think. The conversation included involving humans and how BrainWise can use gen AI/chatbots to support BrainWise educators, health professionals and graduates. 

We will continue to ask questions and gather information (Wise Way #8), such as a scientific study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group that examined how gen AI could be adopted and used by humans to benefit a business. The findings found that that humans supported by AI were much better than humans working without AI support. (WSJ article).

We agree!

This is new territory and we will be exploring ways to use AI, chatbots, and other machine learning (ML) techniques to help BrainWise instructors reach more children, youth and adults.



Thank you for supporting BrainWise!

On a Lighter Note

When Anja Rozen was 13 years old, she won a Lions Club art contest to create a poster depicting what peace looks like She submitted her poster through her local Lions Club in Slovenia. Her poster was chosen from those submitted by 600,000 children from throughout the world.

She said the arms represent the earth that binds and unites us. The figures show that “humans are woven together. If someone gives up, others fall. We are all connected to our planet and to each other, but unfortunately we are little aware of it. We are woven together. Other people weave alongside me my own story; and I weave theirs."

Humans Are Woven Together, Connected to the Planet and Each Other



3 minute Video of Anja Explaining her Peace Poster