Interview by NRC Newspaper

I am excited to have been featured in the Wetenschap (Science) section of NRC, a major national newspaper in the Netherlands. The piece was also subsequently picked up and republished by Leeuwarder Courant, a regional newspaper based in Friesland.

In the interview, I had the chance to share our key insights and findings from my PhD dissertation on the development and evaluation of engaging chatbots for health counselling and the controlled use of large language models. We discussed the potential risks when people rely on AI chatbots for health support and the importance of developing safer, more reliable digital tools. I explained our approach of combining the structure and safety of pre-programmed responses with the engaging, natural language capabilities of large language models (LLMs), while still maintaining human oversight. In our research, we found that responses generated by models like GPT-4 were often rated higher in quality than those written by humans, although some generated utterances were deemed inappropriate and required to be filtered out. I also emphasized the need to use these technologies in a supportive way alongside human care, rather than as standalone solutions, and discussed the broader potential of this method in various fields where both engagement and reliability are critical.

Many thanks to NRC and Ellen de Bruin for bringing attention to our research and giving this topic a platform.

Read the full news article, titled “ChatGPT gebruiken als therapeut? Ik zou het niet aanraden”, on the NRC website in Dutch: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/14/chatgpt-gebruiken-als-therapeut-ik-zou-het-niet-aanraden-a4913854.

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A reference to the article appeared on the newspaper’s front page.

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