Bennet Feld

In many services, value comes from the relationship between two people, not from completing a task. What happens to that value when one side of the relationship is an AI? In psychotherapy, the relationship between patient and therapist is itself part of the treatment. We conduct a randomized controlled trial of a voice-based AI application that collaboratively teaches users the techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Access to the AI tool reduces anxiety and depression symptoms, with effect sizes and cognitive mechanisms that resemble those in trials of human-led CBT. The quality of the therapeutic alliance is comparable to that between patient and human therapist. The AI also reshapes care-seeking: assignment to the intervention reduces the demand for human therapy, while demand for medication and lay social support is unchanged. A decomposition attributes the drop to both symptom improvement and a shift in preference between an AI and a human provider. Open-ended responses indicate that for many the absence of a human interlocutor is itself the appeal, reducing social-evaluative threat: participants do not abandon the therapeutic relationship so much as prefer a different one. Substituting a human relationship for an AI relationship also need not reduce human connection: treated participants report more social contact and less loneliness.

This paper leverages generative AI to build a network structure over 5,000 product nodes, where directed edges represent input-output relationships in production. We layout a two-step 'build-prune' approach using an ensemble of prompt-tuned generative AI classifications. The 'build' step provides an initial distribution of edge-predictions, the 'prune' step then re-evaluates all edges. With our AI-generated Production Network (AIPNET) in toe, we document a host of shifts in the network position of products and countries during the 21st century. Finally, we study production network spillovers using the natural experiment presented by the 2017 blockade of Qatar. We find strong evidence of such spill-overs, suggestive of on-shoring of critical production. This descriptive and causal evidence demonstrates some of the many research possibilities opened up by our granular measurement of product linkages, including studies of on-shoring, industrial policy, and other recent shifts in global trade.