The Merger of Artificial Intelligence and Psychiatry

Human moods and behaviors are complex because they interplay our biology, psychology, and day-to-day interactions.
AI is proving adept at understanding natural language, picking up on patterns and sentiment in text and large bodies of data.
Applied to psychiatry, AI may provide tools to measure and detect patterns and associations that are currently too hard to discern.

Psychiatry is an art and a science, and artificial intelligence may provide tools to allow it to better understand what makes us tick.

True to this duality, I have always loved working with people as much as technology, especially the interplay between the two. I approach my work with engineering precision and record keeping, but I also pay close attention to both the “fuzzy” psychology of nurture, as well as the more medical biology of our “nature.” Along these lines, I often tell my patients that we aim to work on the “hardware and software” to understand ourselves better and optimize how we feel and perform.

Human behavior is complex, noisy, and sometimes even erratic. The arrival and popularization of usable, consumer-facing artificial intelligence in the form of GPT-3 marks a step towards understanding this complexity. With the ability to analyze and extract patterns from large amounts of data, AI may provide nuanced and specific insights into what makes each of us happy, healthy, and productive. It’s not here yet–but quite soon, this will be a huge leap forward for providers, patients, and everyone who tracks mood, steps, heart rate, and sleep.

A Visual Art

Humans are highly visual creatures, and a disproportionate amount of our brains are dedicated to vision. Coincidentally, GPT-3 has shown us its astounding ability in artistry and linguistic analysis. A picture is worth a thousand words, and on the visual level, no one can argue that the art produced by DALL-E, an AI image generator, is magnificent. Sure, there’s the occasional hallucination, an extra finger, a creepy facial expression, but these faults are increasingly minor in comparison to the overall stunning “creativity” we see when we tell DALL-E to draw any scene in the style of Van Gogh.[…]

Human moods and behaviors are complex because they interplay our biology, psychology, and day-to-day interactions.

AI is proving adept at understanding natural language, picking up on patterns and sentiment in text and large bodies of data.

Applied to psychiatry, AI may provide tools to measure and detect patterns and associations that are currently too hard to discern.

A Visual Art

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