Munmun De Choudhury

Featured: Munmun De Choudhury, Professor, College of Computing

OpenAI has consulted with mental health experts to improve how ChatGPT responds to people who appear to be in a psychological crisis. The company has also formed a council with eight outside experts in psychology and human-computer interaction to advise its policy team.

OpenAI, the developer of the text-to-text generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, announced in October the establishment of an Expert Council on Well-Being and AI.

Professor Munmun De Choudhury is one of eight experts serving on the initial council. OpenAI invited De Choudhury for her expertise on how digital resources affect youth mental health.

Munmun De Choudhury shares how society’s perception of social media and its effects on mental health have evolved over time.

Featured: Munmun De Choudhury, associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing.

Tech companies “are barely scratching the surface” of what they might do to help support young users, says Munmun de Choudhury, who studies the intersection of social media and mental health and founded the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab at Georgia Tech. Apps like TikTok and Instagram can be resources for teens to explore their identities, form communities, and learn about mental health. Instead of banning social media outright, she says, legislation should push companies to understand young people and to rethink the mechanisms that keep kids scrolling past their own comfort level without restricting the ways the platforms can be helpful.

Munmun De Choudhury, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, is also examining digital data for insights into well-being. Dr. De Choudhury’s work over the years has focused not only on population studies, like the Hedonometer, but also on the individual.

In 2013, she and colleagues found that by looking at new mothers on social media, they were able to help predict which ones might develop postpartum depression, based on their posts before the birth of their babies. One of the most telling signs? The use of first-person singular pronouns, like “I” and “me.”

The key to understanding romantic relationships is an age-old mystery. But the elusive language of love may be easier to decipher with new Georgia Institute of Technology computing research that brings insight into how we find, talk about, and improve our relationships with that significant other.

Munmun De Choudhury, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech who studies mental health and social media, and was previously a member of a Microsoft Research team studying depression, weighs in on the benefits of social media for mental health and wellness.

The School of Interactive Computing's Munmun De Choudhury is featured on NPR's On the Media to discuss the question of whether the algorithms built into social media and your cell phone are quietly probing your psyche.