Facial Recognition and AI Therapists

Happy New Year all! A little before the holidays, Cathi and Nora recorded our first ep for 2022. This time, Cathi talks about the news, initially reported by Politico, that facial recognition company Clearview AI received patent approval for what's being dubbed a 'search engine for faces'. Read Gizmodo's account of the details here. Nora talks about Technology Review's look at the possibility of training machine learning systems on speech data from sessions between mental health professionals and clients. The idea is to look for patterns that would help improve therapy and train more (human) therapists, but Cathi and Nora talk about the potential for actual AI therapy to address the shortage in mental health access.