From Lived Experience to Insight: Unpacking the Psychological Risks of Using AI Conversational Agents
Mohit Chandra, Suchismita Naik, Denae Ford, Ebele Okoli, Munmun De Choudhury, Mahsa Ershadi, Gonzalo Ramos, Javier Hernandez, Ananya Bhattacharjee, Shahed Warreth, Jina Suh · 2025
Recent gains in popularity of AI conversational agents have led to their increased use for improving productivity and supporting well-being.While previous research has aimed to understand the risks associated with interactions with AI conversational agents, these studies often fall short in capturing the lived experiences of individuals.Additionally, psychological risks have often been presented as a sub-category within broader AI-related risks in past taxonomy works, leading to under-representation of the impact of psychological risks of AI use.To address these challenges, our work presents a novel risk taxonomy focusing on psychological risks of using AI gathered through the lived experiences of individuals.We employed a mixed-method approach, involving a comprehensive survey with 283 people with lived mental health experience and workshops involving experts with lived experience to develop a psychological risk taxonomy.Our taxonomy features 19 AI behaviors, 21 negative psychological impacts, and 15 contexts related to individuals.Additionally, we propose a novel multi-path vignettebased framework for understanding the complex interplay between * Work done during internship at Microsoft Research.