I'm a little confused by this response about informed consent (https://twitter.com/RobertRMorris/status/1611582827224797185) but I think it illustrates a significant problem among some researchers with conflating "research ethics" with "would an IRB allow me to do it" which is potentially really harmful. I would hope that the reason to seek informed consent isn't because a regulatory body forces you to, but because it is the right and ethical thing to do. (2/n)

But regardless, based on the thread I think that though the help providers were aware of the AI (since they were choosing to use it), it seems that the people seeking help were not aware. Though based on the "once people learned" finding, at least some of them must have been debriefed? Were they essentially following typical protocol for a deception experiment? (Though if that were the case I would have expected that as an answer re: consent rather than "we didn't have to".) (3/n)

The Twitter thread emphasizes that they weren't using PII, but prompts from people seeking mental health support are still potentially quite sensitive, and some folks on Twitter were concerned about data going back to OpenAI - I assume that GPT-3 can run internally though? In which case I suppose the privacy risks would be the same as when people choose to use the system at all. (4/n)