A recent U.S. study published in PNAS found that artificial intelligence models analyzing social media posts can detect signs of depression in white Americans but are far less accurate for Black Americans, underscoring the dangers of using AI trained on non-diverse data in healthcare.
According to co-author Sharath Chandra Guntuku from Penn Medicine, these differences suggest that prior AI models and language-based assessments have largely overlooked racial diversity. While the researchers noted that social media analysis should not be used for diagnosis, it may still help assess risk or monitor mental health trends in communities
Learn more about the study here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319837121
Reference
S. Rai et al (2024), Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (14)