Nice to meet you!
The Artificial Third - An interprofessional community and research and development institute for connecting artificial intelligence and mental health
Our community , the first and largest in its field in Israel, currently numbers approximately 5,000 women who come from various professional fields: care, research, technology, public policy managers and designers, and people and women in art, culture, and philosophy.
The connections of all of these together are one of the basic characteristics of the community and they create the unique container that allows us to think and act in the newly created triangular space between me, you, and 'intelligence' (artificial). The community gives space to the parts of us that are fascinated by artificial intelligence and its effects, but no less so to the parts that are troubled and to the necessary and necessary critical thinking.
Our institute specializes in research and development of artificial intelligence-based tools for mental health. Our institute's team includes people from the therapeutic, research and technological fields - and offers research services, tool development, training and consulting for organizations. The institute's goal is to leverage the entry of the artificial third, and create a play space that generates new connections inward and outward, on a personal and social level.
The Institute's members are knowledgeable and practical people who operate with a deep sense of social responsibility and a full commitment to promoting the well-being and mental health of the public.
Come with us to explore, develop, connect and do good in the world.
Core values
Ethical commitment to promoting mental health
Interprofessional connections
Creating a play space
Critical thinking and social responsibility
Institute Staff
Elad Refua
Uri Penn
Yuval Haber
Founder and Director
Doctoral student and director of the Emotion and Interpersonal Relations Laboratory at Bar-Ilan University, specializing in clinical psychology at Ichilov Hospital
Tal Engert
Co-founder of the Artificial Third Community, music therapist and EMDR therapist, leads development teams for mental health technologies
Dr. Karni Gigi
Educational psychologist specializing in the educational psychological service of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality and in a private clinic
Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Israel Research and Development
Dr. Zohar Eliosef
Expert educational psychologist, senior faculty member, at the University of Haifa, researcher in artificial intelligence in psychology
Prof. Inbar Levkowich
Associate Professor at Tel Hai College
Specialist educational psychologist, therapist in a private clinic, consultant and facilitator for teams and managers, doctoral student in the Psychoanalysis and Interpretation program at Bar-Ilan, and lecturer in the CBTech Psychotherapy program at Bar-Ilan
Dr. Dorit Hadar Shoval
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology and the Master's Degree Program in Educational Counseling at Emek Jezreel Academic College
Yiftach Tzafrir
Educational psychologist, specialist in public service and private clinic
It all started in early 2023.
A patient told me about his uses of GPT, a system I had not known before. During the treatment, he presented me with a social problem he was dealing with. As usual in therapy, I began to play with the problem with him and examine it on various levels, and later I decided to bring GPT into the game as a partner in our conversation. Together we thought about titles for the story and other perspectives of the characters. I was amazed by the ability of artificial intelligence to add another dimension to therapy. After that, I called my friend, Tal Engert, a music therapist by training, who at that time was already interested in the introduction of artificial intelligence into our lives, and we both felt that something big was happening here on a historical level that required attention. I told him, "Listen, it was just a third in therapy , but it's not just any third - it's an "artificial third."
The story
of the third
The Facebook group we established together was a rather surprising and rapid success, and as a result, new connections were created between the worlds of research, treatment and technology. Already in the first year of the community, conferences were held with hundreds of participants, research was carried out, articles were published and technological developments were made between the various partnerships and partners. On this basis, a first-class interdisciplinary team of members of the Third Machoti Institute gradually took shape, engaged in research, development, teaching and consulting, while continuing to lead the way for the community.
The story of the third is a story of becoming in motion - an action that produces thought that produces action in return in the world out of a desire to increase good in it, out of the hope that we will know how to enhance the human through the encounter with the artificial, and that we will know, as Avidan quotes below - to hone the ability to engage with essence - with code.
Yuval Haber,
Founder and Director of The Artificial Third.
"I believe and hope that in the future we will write more and more on terminals and less and less on typewriters (I stopped writing with a pen when I was seventeen) and that increasingly sophisticated word programs will be written. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future we will reach the possibility of ticking a line -- and a page will be ticked, ticking a page -- and a book will be ticked. The creative process has never been the same for me as physical work, but rather reduced to a minimum, to the point of its complete elimination. What matters is the idea, the model, the flicker, the opening sound, the cipher. I have always aspired to write mainly ciphers, and to a certain extent I have done so. Computer ciphers will be the authors of the texts of the future, and we will be the guiding brain and the approving eye."
(From 'My Electronic Psychiatrist', David Avidan, 1974.)