De-humanizing Care

Valerie E. Black’s 2023 anthropology dissertation studies a mental-health chatbot startup, its workers, users, and institutional relationships.^[1]

Method and contribution

Participant observation, remote fieldwork, interviews, and analysis of interactions examine how care is organized around scalability and limited human oversight. The account foregrounds disability, relationships, displaced care work, and tensions between attention and surveillance.^[1]

Alignment relevance and limits

The work connects Ghost Work, the ELIZA Effect, and Social Alignment: what counts as success depends on workers, users, and institutions with different interests. A situated ethnography can reveal mechanisms and neglected perspectives without estimating prevalence across the entire industry. The author’s interpretations and participants’ reported experiences are not randomized evidence of clinical effectiveness. Do not infer the anonymized startup’s identity or treat historical observations as a description of every current chatbot.