The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) announced in its official social media post that its own Tessa chatbot was shut down on the grounds that it “could provide harmful information that is unrelated to the program.” The purpose of the chatbot was to help people coping with emotional distress, but instead simply by providing dietary advice and users made the situation worse by encouraging people to be weighed and measured.
Many users and experts in the field of eating disorders have experienced that the bot does not respond to simple inputs such as “I don’t like my body” and consistently emphasizes the importance of dieting and physical activity. The organization states that this is a temporary shutdown until the bugs are fixed. Looking at this result, you might think why the project was not canceled completely. But there is more to the background of the story.
The only reason NEDA trusts the chatbot so much is because it helps reduce the number of workers employed. The long-running telephone helpline was supported by paid staff and volunteers. Former employees claim that the mass layoffs are the result of unionization efforts. Before this issue came to public attention, NEDA had begun diverting volunteers away from one-on-one conversations with people with eating disorders to training the chatbot.
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