AI助聊提升心理平台服务量,却让部分咨询师退出,但整体需求反而增长。
Generative AI and Two-Tiered Online Mental Health Communities

- 用生成式AI辅助回复公众提问,扩大服务覆盖面。
- 咨询师发帖变多但单次回复长度不变,社交认可度下降。
- 经济动机强的咨询师更积极,内在动机者反而减少参与。
在线心理健康社区(OMHCs)是分层平台,通过公开问答论坛连接患者与持证咨询师,并提供付费私密咨询。其双层结构使生成式AI(genAI)集成面临策略困境:对话代理可提升响应速度与覆盖范围,缓解人力短缺,但也可能重塑咨询师在提供深度专业支持、情感关怀及付费咨询中的角色,进而影响平台收入与长期可持续性。基于某领先平台引入genAI对话代理的准自然实验,我们分析了AI上线对咨询师参与度的影响。采用多种识别策略发现,AI接入后咨询师发帖强度显著上升,平均回复长度保持不变,每帖社会认可度下降。机制分析表明,AI提升了响应效率并扩大患者参与,拓展了咨询师的机会空间,部分活动从非AI子论坛转移而来。咨询师反应异质:内在动机者减少参与,经济驱动者则增强竞争投入。这种动态引发跨层级溢出效应:不活跃咨询师付费咨询减少,而积极参与公共交流者维持甚至扩大后续需求。总体而言,在分层专业平台中,需求扩张与竞争激励可超越内在挤出效应。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Online mental health communities (OMHCs) are tiered platforms that connect patients with licensed counselors through public Q&A forums and paid private consultations. Their two-tier structure creates a strategic dilemma for genAI integration. Conversational agents can provide scalable and timely responses to a broader set of patients, alleviating persistent supply shortages, but their large-scale presence may also reshape counselors' participation in providing nuanced expertise, emotionally sensitive support, and paid consultations, which are central to platform revenue and long-run sustainability. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment from the integration of a genAI-based conversational agent in a leading OMHC, we examine how AI entry affects counselor participation. Using multiple identification strategies, we find that posting intensity increases significantly after AI integration, while average response length remains unchanged and per-post social recognition declines. Mechanism analyses show that AI improves responsiveness and expands patient engagement, enlarging counselors' opportunity sets, with activity partially reallocated from a nearby non-AI subforum. Counselors respond heterogeneously: intrinsically motivated counselors reduce participation, whereas economically motivated counselors intensify competitive effort. These dynamics generate cross-tier spillovers: inactive counselors experience declines in paid consultations, while those who increase public participation preserve or expand downstream demand. Overall, our findings show that in tiered professional platforms, demand expansion and competitive incentives can outweigh intrinsic crowding-out.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。