AI Pre-Deployment Simulations Are Vital To Developing Generative AI That Can Best Provide Mental Health Advice By Lance Eliot ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned AI scientist and consultant. Follow Author Jul 02, 2026, 03:15am EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Summary A new method, pre-deployment simulation, is proposed to refine generative AI, particularly for mental health advice. Millions rely on general LLMs like ChatGPT for mental well-being guidance, despite them not being designed for this critical purpose, leading to potential risks. The simulation involves feeding real-world mental health chat samples from existing AIs to new, unreleased models. The new AI's responses are then audited and its parameters adjusted to improve its advice, ensuring it doesn't "scam" the testing process. This targeted training aims to make AI a safer, more effective tool for mental health support, addressing the dual-use nature of AI in this sensitive field. This approach is crucial for mitigating downsides and enhancing the benefits of AI for societal mental well-being.
Pre-deployment simulations can boost AI toward giving better mental health advice. getty In today’s column, I examine the potential use of a new method known as pre-deployment simulation to shape generative AI and large language models (LLMs) and showcase how this clever approach can especially be used to better provide AI-generated mental health advice. The odds are high that leveraging this innovative technique would be enormously significant.
Why so? Because hundreds of millions of people are routinely leaning into AI to get timely and effective mental health guidance. The popular AI models ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, CoPilot, and other LLMs are not directly designed for that crucial purpose. Instead, the AI is broadly aimed at all sorts of uses, such as answering how to fix your car or how to best cook an egg. Aiding people with their mental well-being is a bird of another feather, as they say.
Pre-deployment simulation is a recently announced strategy by OpenAI for developing LLMs overall. In pre-deployment simulation, an AI maker taps into recorded AI chats of a released model that has already been in public use and contains real-world interactions. A special sampling of those chats is selected for testing purposes for the unreleased new model. The samples are fed to the unreleased new AI, and responses by the new AI are captured. Those captured responses are audited to ascertain whether the AI is reacting properly. Once this cycle of testing is extensively undertaken, the AI maker refines the AI and can feel more comfortable that the AI is ready for release. I propose that whereas this approach is of an overarching nature for AI writ large, it is also feasible and sensible to use pre-deployment simulation for the specific task of getting LLMs up to speed on generating mental health advice.
This analysis of AI breakthroughs is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here).
As a quick background, I’ve been extensively covering and analyzing a myriad of facets regarding the advent of modern-era AI that produces mental health advice and performs AI-driven therapy. This rising use of AI has…