“In other words, these conversations with a social robot gave caregivers something that they sorely lack – a space to talk about themselves”

so they’re doing a job that’s demanding, thankless, often unpaid (in the case of this study, entirely unpaid, because they exclusively recruited “informal” caregivers)

and…it turns out talking about it improves their mood?

yeah, that’s groundbreaking. no one could have foreseen it.

if you did this with actual humans it’d be “lol yeah that’s just therapy and/or having friends” and you wouldn’t get it published in a scientific paper.

it’s written up as a “robotics” story but I’m not sure how it being a “robot” changes anything compared to a chatbot. it seems like this is yet another “discovery” of “hey you can talk to an LLM chatbot and it kinda sorta looks like therapy, if you squint at it”.

(tapping the sign about why “AI therapy” is stupid and trying to address the wrong problem)