These days many people usually use ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools to ask many questions. They find their solution within a second. But according to a recent study conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, many people with autism are also using ChatGPT and other AI tools to ask advice or help to solve their problems faced at their workplaces. These tools are very helpful for them. But sometimes they give bad advice and increase many problems. People with autism are also debating about whether using chatbots is really good for them.
This research was led by Andrew Begel. It was recently published in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024) in Honolulu. In this study, researchers involved 11 people with autism disorder. These people were asked to get help from two sources such as a chatbot based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 and a human career counselor who was pretending to be a chatbot. They mainly wanted to check how these large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT help people.
When researchers observed the results, they found that most of them liked a chatbot more as compared to a human counselor who tried to work as a chatbot. The chatbot responded very quickly and gave answers accurately. It also gave answers in bullet points which was very helpful for these people. On the other hand, a human counselor asked so many questions and wanted to have a long conversation to give them advice. Participants did not like that as they wanted their answers very quickly.
Many participants found the chatbot very helpful as it provided quick and accurate answers. But a professional who helps people with autism to get jobs found that some of the chatbot’s advice was not very helpful. When these people asked ChatGPT about how to make friends then it suggested that you can go to people and talk to them and it will help you make friends. This is very hard for people with autism to just go and talk to anyone.
Researchers of this study said that they can train a chatbot specifically to help people with autism. It will give them better advice. But not everyone agreed on this. Some of them think it is helpful. On the other hand, some of them think it is not helpful as it puts too much pressure on people with autism.
Reference Link:
More information: JiWoong Jang et al, “It’s the only thing I can trust”: Envisioning Large Language Model Use by Autistic Workers for Communication Assistance, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024).
