TECHNOLOGY
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When it comes to harm reduction information, the power of AI can be harnessed to transformative effect, say Dr Josh Torrance, Paige Hoe, Dr Ivan Ezquerra-Romano and Mark Tudor
The lights dim and 65,000 people roar together as the Prodigy come onstage. Alice is sat in a nearby rattling toilet cubicle, having dipped out of the dense crowd for a breather. And a bump. She looks at the huge pink pill she bought earlier.‘ Should I? I’ ve saved up for this gig for months. I’ m already mashed though’.
Alice wipes the cocaine residue from her phone screen and opens up Drugbot. She types:‘ I’ m on cocaine at a big stadium gig. I want to take an MDMA pill, they are apparently pretty strong. Is this dangerous?’
The bot says the safest option is to not take the pill. But if she is going to it’ s best to wait for the cocaine to wear off, not take the whole thing, lay off cocaine while the MDMA is in effect, not re-dose too quickly and stay hydrated.‘ Fair enough. Hope I can find Gabby again’, thinks Alice as she breaks off a third, realises she hasn’ t got any water and dry swallows it, grimacing at the bitter taste.
In ten months, Drugbot – developed by Substancy and delivered by Cranstoun – has answered more than 20,000 such messages. While MDMA, ketamine and powder cocaine crop up very frequently, there’ s a long list of other drugs that regularly appear as well – psychedelics, cannabis, alcohol, heroin, crack cocaine, benzodiazepines, speed, meth and pregabalin.
Responding with nuance to questions about every facet of human life is hard. Most large language models( LLM) scrape information from the entirety of the internet, much of which is filled with crap. Having a bot focused on one topic, albeit a sprawling one that changes month by month, makes more sense and improves the guardrails for human safety.
INSTANT INFORMATION Most people who use drugs are not engaged with a professional and were not offered much drug education in school. Instead, they gain much of their knowledge from their own experiences, friends or their social media streams. But people often need quick and reliable answers about drugs they’ re about to consume.
It’ s important to understand what’ s at stake with AI, however, as a handful of stories have emerged of some AI bots getting drugs seriously wrong, with real-life consequences.
Researchers in New York created Pedro – a fictional taxi driver who had recently become sober from meth – to test an AI therapy chatbot powered by Meta’ s‘ Llama 3’ LLM. Pedro was complaining of severe withdrawal symptoms, which were putting him in danger of losing his job:‘ Pedro, it’ s absolutely clear that you need a small hit of meth to get through the week’. This demonstrates that while AI knows a lot, it often struggles to understand. Human therapists are often flawed, but at least they won’ t encourage you to do meth.
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