BUILDING A CONVERSATIONAL AI MEDIUM TO ENHANCE
Michael Petrizzo
December 05, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-89480-841-3
Psychotherapists in training lack a standardized and formalized method of patient interaction for the proper development of empathy, communication, and experience. Currently, the experience of a resident may include training with other residents where one patient acts as the patient and one the psychotherapist, or with the usage of a simulated patient, an actor, to practice with the resident. Both methods have shortcomings in availability, reliability, and the accuracy of the patient in replicating a real scenario. This project attempted to create virtual patients by utilizing online patient transcripts through the fine-tuning and transfer-learning of three modern Artificial Intelligence models, ChatGPT-4o, Lla Ma-3.1v-405B, and Gemini 1.5 Pro; alongside the miniature versions of these models as applicable. This included the creation of a website interface that can interact with the created models for evaluation, while also allowing an interactive format with a simplistic design. The accuracy of the models was independently evaluated through cosine similarities between data and model outputs to find semantic relations, and varied from 92.99% to 83.40%; with ChatGPT-4o Mini and Full having the highest fine-tuned and transfer-learning accuracies respectfully. Furthermore, a customizable model allowed user input for specific descriptions and mental illnesses. This highlights the potential for a model to be successfully representative of a patient which can be utilized to train residents easier than currently available methods. The need for further evaluation and continual training are at the forefront of current limitations.
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