This AI bot finds suicidal messages on China’s Weibo, helping volunteer psychologists save lives

Wang Le’s bedroom is dim and silent, the curtains tightly drawn. The only sounds come from mouse clicks and a clattering keyboard. Unable to live and work like a normal person for nearly a decade due to a social phobia, the internet has been his only connection to the outside world. It even saved his life.

Wang had to rely on his relatives to leave food at his front gate every week or two because he could not even order takeout if it meant talking to people by phone. In the spring, he contemplated suicide but hesitated. Afraid of death, but also afraid of life, he shared his despair on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like social platform in China.

“Are you OK?”, a stranger said in a message he received soon after. “Would you like to talk to me?”

In his late 20s, Wang lives alone in a small town in northern China. His parents are migrant workers in one of the country's biggest cities. The message moved him, knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who cared for him.

Wang has since befriended the stranger, who turned out to be a psychological consultant. She found him with the help of the Tree Hole bot, an AI program that spots suicidal intentions on Weibo and alerts a group of nearly 600 psychological scholars, consultants and volunteers who reach out to those in trouble.

Launched in July 2018, the team has prevented more than 1,000 suicides, said Huang Zhisheng, creator of the program and a senior artificial intelligence researcher at Vrije University of Amsterdam.