The helpline run by Vita Activa, our parent organization, was inundated last September with far more requests for help than it usually handles. But what originally seemed like normal growth quickly escalated into calls for help outside Vita Activa’s scope of work.
Once the dust settled, an investigation into the massive spike in calls for help showed that the helpline’s inclusion in directories compiled and referred by various technology companies – without Vita Activa’s permission and without context for its use – caused the dramatic increase.
Vita Activa’s helpline had been included in multiple AI providers’ responses when users asking AI for help with self-harm, suicidal ideation and severe emotional distress and was immediately referring people who sought help, even if they weren’t part of Vita’s regular clientele.
The incident and the resulting fallout brought Vita Activa to a major conclusion: “Technology cannot replace the relationships of care that sustain mental health, nor can it become the emotional caretaker of the social ruptures it itself contributes to amplify,” write Ana Arriagada and Luisa Ortiz Pérez in a recently published report.
Arriagada, the managing director for product design and implementation for Vita Activa, and Ortiz Pérez, the executive director of Vita Activa, are the authors of “When AI Efficiency Collapses Care Infrastructures in the Global South,” a report focused on what happens when artificial intelligence, in an effort to be efficient, overwhelms care infrastructure.
Read the report below.
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