Last month, Dartmouth announced an AI mental health resource called Evergreen.AI. The initiative is an AI chatbot aiming to “help students flourish by providing personalized guidance and support in real time.” The first chatbot will debut in December while, according to the College, “the fully generative, more personalized chatbot debuts for testing at the end of 2026.” The price tag is estimated to be $16.5 million, which will be funded by parent and alumni donations. While some students have welcomed the potential to increase mental health accessibility, others have expressed concern about de-personalized mental health care. We asked our writers, how do you feel about Evergreen.AI?
Dartmouth’s push for Evergreen seems like a misallocation of resources, as it seems unlikely that a digital tool can ever truly provide the nuance and trust that a human therapist can. Investing in AI therapy risks diverting focus from the wellness programs we already have. It’s important to note that Evergreen is wholly dependent on donations rather than institutional funds, making this massive investment seem coercive and ingenuine. If the College is unwilling to use its own resources to make Evergreen a reality, it would at least be better served by directing the donations of parents and alumni towards improving our existing mental health resources instead.
— Victoria Webb ’29, Columnist
I am skeptical of Evergreen. While Dartmouth’s attempt to expand mental-health resources through technology might seem innovative and well-meaning, it risks reducing human connection to an algorithmic exchange, as The Dartmouth’s Eli Moyse ’27 noted well in his opinion piece last month. Mental health support requires empathy, nuance and trust, qualities that no chatbot can genuinely replicate. Dartmouth should focus on improving access to real counseling rather than outsourcing care to artificial intelligence.
— Caroline Menna ’29, Columnist
Evergreen is a scary stepping stone towards a future in which human intimacy is outsourced to machines. I appreciate the College’s acknowledgement of the mental health struggles that characterize our generation, and I believe that there is great potential utility in a chatbot that directs students to relevant mental health resources. However, in regards to actual counseling, I think the College should direct its resources towards promoting more in-person, human counseling options instead. Evergreen could gather a scary amount of information about Dartmouth students, pairing a knowledge of building locations with potential to track sleep, physical activity, social connectivity, academic progress and so on, providing the “value of sharing that data com[ing] directly back to student[s],” according to a video on the project website. This is similar verbiage to that used by technology companies to continue to justify data extraction from the broader populace for the purpose of “personalization” and “improving user experience.” The extent to which the College has actively advocated for Evergreen as a replacement for in-person counseling is deeply disturbing to me. Through its Instagram, website and press releases, the College has actively promoted its intentions of deploying a large team of students, faculty and staff to expand the service, with the goal of spreading it to other college campuses. Dartmouth should not lead the charge in normalizing digital intimacy based upon extensive tracking of human behavior. True progress towards resolving our nation’s youth mental health crisis involves improving human care — not passing it off to robots.
— Ana Arzoumanidis ’28, Staff Columnist
It is not particularly helpful to be a luddite when it comes to artificial intelligence, but it is important, particularly in the realm of wellbeing, to recognize the importance of human connection. As other authors are sure to note, when someone is seeking help, they want to be both pointed toward the right resources as well as to be emotionally understood. AI can only accomplish only the former.
I have no issue with a general Dartmouth AI tool that can help new or overwhelmed students navigate the vast and disconnected array of resources at Dartmouth. However, we cannot allow Evergreen to become a resource in and of itself to fall back upon in times of emotional need nor a tool that supplants — but rather supplements — critical thinking and the use of your own actual intelligence.
— Luke Montalbano ’27, Associate Opinion Editor
I don’t see the purpose of Evergreen. What supposedly makes the app unique is contextual awareness and knowledge of campus. It analyzes and stores student data on private Dartmouth-owned servers, according to their official announcement. If existing LLMs are already able to perform ‘therapy work’ with context, then what is the point of Evergreen? The $5 million that they have raised in funding is being used to employ students and buy server space to store our data. To me, this comes off as more of a surveillance tool than something designed to genuinely help. I appreciate the initiative, but I think they need to be a lot more transparent about what exactly they are building, how they are building it and perhaps most fundamentally — why do we even need it?
— Rohan Taneja ’28, Staff Columnist
What I’m most curious about Evergreen is how it fits into Dartmouth’s clean energy narrative. Over the last few years, Dartmouth has been increasingly committed to sustainability initiatives and has stated that they are working toward decreasing carbon emissions on campus to zero. Due to the energy required to train AI models however, the University of Massachusetts Amherst reports that training a model can emit over 284 tonnes of CO2 which is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of over 70 average U.S. homes. As of yet, these concerns seem to be tertiary to those my fellow opinion writers have posed, and I’m curious how Dartmouth may respond.
— David Adkins ’26, Opinion Editor
