Edit: the study compared therapist outcomes to AI outcomes to placebo outcomes. Therapists in this field performed slightly better than placebo, which is pretty terrible. The AI outcomes performed much worse than placebo which is very terrible.
Some people knew what the tobacco companies were secretly doing, yet they kept quiet, and let countless family tragedies happen.
What are best channels for people with info to help halt the corruption, this time?
(The channels might be different than usual right now, with much of US federal being disrupted.)
And if the alleged payer is outside the field, this might also be relevant to the public interest in other regards. (For example, if they're trying to suppress this, what else are they trying to do. Even if it turns out the research is invalid.)
I agree. Asking questions which are normal in my own field resulted in stonewalling and obvious distress. The worst thing being this leading to the end of what was a good relationship.
If not, you might consider whether you have actionable information yourself, any professional obligations you have (e.g., if you work in science/health/safety yourself), any societal obligations, whether reporting the allegation would be betraying a trust, and what the calculus is there.
Also it is not expected that the training material for the model deals with the actual practical aspects of therapy, only some of the theoretical aspects are probably in that material
BrickLabs have developed an expert-fine-tuned model specifically to provide psychotherapy. Their model has shown modestly positive results in a reasonably large preregistered RCT.
waitlist control, where people get nothing
psychoeducational, where people get some kind of educational content about mental health but not therapy
existing nonpsychological service, like physical checkups with a nurse
existing therapy, so not placebo but current treatment
pharmacological placebo, where they're given a placebo pill and told its psychiatric medication for their concern
A kind of "nerfed" version of the therapy, such as supportive therapy where the clinician just provides empathy etc but nothing else
How to interpret results depends on the control.
It's relevant to debates about general vs specific effects in therapy (rapport, empathy, fit) versus specific effects (effects due to specific techniques of a specific therapy).
Bruce Wampold has written a lot about types of controls although he has a hard nonspecific/general effects take on therapy.