14-year-old tested whether AI can recognise stress; a basic model beat ChatGPT-4o

Zeynep's work earned her a finalist place in the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge Fourteen-year-old Zeynep Demirbas has found that ChatGPT-4o is less accurate than a mental health-focused AI model and a simpler machine-learning system at detecting stress in human written text.Zeynep, an eighth-grade student at Transit Middle School in East Amherst, New York, tested four different models using more than 3,500 Reddit posts. According to Society for Science, the posts had already been labelled by humans as showing stress or no stress.Her project, titled “Evaluating the reliability of Large Language Models for stress detection”, has earned her a place among the finalists in the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. The competition recognises young students working on science-based projects.Zeynep became interested in the project after speaking with a family friend who is a psychologist. The psychologist told her that some health insurance companies were exploring large language models (LLMs) as cheaper, 24/7 alternatives to human therapists. Zeynep wondered whether AI systems could actually be trusted to identify stress.Testing AI models To...