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February 19, 2024 · 8:00 am

How creating GenAI prompts reminds me of dementia communication

For the past year, I’ve immersed myself in the emerging generative AI technologies. Mostly for my job, but also for my personal curiosity. Every industry is being impacted by AI, including caregiving. If you’ve followed any of the AI discussion, you’ll know that while the technology offers great potential in certain areas, it also can produce errors, which are referred to as “hallucinations.”

Users of these gen AI models are given the responsibility of creating suitable prompts for whatever tasks they are asking the model to complete. There are now people being hired as “prompt engineers” solely for that purpose. The reasoning goes that the better the prompt, the better the execution.

Instead of just typing in a few keywords into a search engine bar, one has to think about a variety of details. There’s a lot of trial and error in the process, with the accompanying frustration and wonder when you get it just right.

This made me think about communicating with someone in the earlier stages of dementia. The person’s communication skills are typically not that impaired early on, but some aspects may be slightly off. The misuse of a word. The incorrect memory recall. The out of left field response. Not understanding a routine request the person’s done many times before.

I remember having conversations with my father during those early stages of the disease and it was disconcerting because our discussion was mostly normal, until it suddenly wasn’t. And that’s how it feels to me working with generative AI technology. It’s accurate a good deal of the time but there’s still something just a bit askew.

If gen AI is characterized as being almost human, we sometimes feel our loved ones with dementia are not the people they once were. Creating AI prompts reminds me to be thoughtful when assembling the building blocks of communication, and how we may be required to reconstruct our typical communication style with our loved ones with dementia, by reframing questions and devising ingenious ways to keep the conversation, and the connection, alive.

The prompt used for the blog post image: “A digital illustration of an adult daughter and her 80-year-old mother with dementia setting at the dining room table, having a conversation with each other, with hearts floating around them.”

ChatGPT: Does it have uses for caregivers?

If you’ve been online over the last few months, you’ve probably come across discussions about ChatGPT. The conversational AI-powered (artificial intelligence) tool developed by OpenAI is the latest tech fad that some experts claim could take over our jobs in the future. (If you are interested in working with images instead of words try the related DALL-E.)

You may have seen some of the program’s capabilities: it can write articles, essays, jokes and songs, debug software code, and create resumes with some input from the user. Users can have a conversation of sorts with ChatGPT while refining their requests and the tool can ingest those new points and update its responses in real time.

As someone who enjoys exploring new tools but retains a healthy amount of skepticism about such tools taking over the world, I’ve spent some time testing out ChatGPT, focusing on how the tool could potentially be of aid to caregivers.

My main takeaway is that while ChatGPT can adequately provide information on a vast amount of topics, the responses are mainly generic and middling in quality, like someone reciting an encyclopedia entry. Your mileage will vary if you are asking a question on a highly technical topic or asking it to generate code for a website. But when asking for caregiving advice such as making a caregiver plan for someone with dementia or tips on aging in place, it regurgitates acceptable but basic advice that can be found across the internet. You can see a couple of examples below:

The glaring issue for me is that there is no attribution with ChatGPT responses. That could be important when you are seeking medical advice such as dementia caregiving tips. Are the pointers it is offering come from a dementia expert like Teepa Snow or a low quality resource? At this point, the responses could be used as a decent starting point, but the user would need to do additional research outside of the ChatGPT system to verify, augment, and personalize the information. Google and other search engines are seeking to incorporate attributes of such AI-based tools into their own programs which would offer a more conversational way to search for information.

I’m going to continue to explore the uses of ChatGPT and how it might be useful for caregivers. If you’ve used the tool, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Photo by Zac Wolff on Unsplash.