Ethical AI for Mental Health Contexts: A Focus on Conservative Communities and Annie the Chatbot

This paper examines ethical protocols in the development of ‘Annie’: a therapeutic generative AI chatbot for supporting anxiety and depression in conservative communities. Annie is an empathetic chatbot that utilises advanced natural language processing techniques for accurate emotion detection and response generation. Moreover, Annie is culturally aware and religiously sensitive. A key element in the development of Annie the chatbot is a thorough ethical framework to ensure the safety of patients and practitioners, and wider organisations and stakeholders, within the specific context of the conservative communities it is aimed at. Initial consultations and workshops with mental health experts from Qatar and Saudi Arabia support the design elements of Annie the chatbot, and research is ongoing to produce an ethical framework that can be used as a reference in the development of AI tools for mental health. Therefore, this paper considers some of the key aspects of responsible and ethical AI based chatbots to ensure ‘harmless, helpful and honest’ design and implementation as the gold standard.