New Delhi, June 11 -- As artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are becoming an inherent part of people's lives, more and more users are spending time chatting with these bots to not just streamline their professional or academic work but also seek mental health advice.

Some people have positive experiences that make AI seem like a low-cost therapist. AI models are programmed to be smart and engaging, but they don't think like humans. ChatGPT and other generative AI models are like your phone's auto-complete text feature on steroids. They have learned to converse by reading text scraped from the internet.

When a person asks a question (called a prompt) such as "how can I stay calm during a stressful work meeting?" the AI forms a response...