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Tremendously poor idea, general purpose chatbots have already led to suicides (example- https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death).
Purpose built ones will have more safeguards but the problem remains that they are hard to control and can easily go off book.
Even if they work perfectly some of the incentives are poor - people may overuse the product and avoid actual socialization, leaning on fake people instead.
And that even if is doing a ton of work, good therapy is rare and extremely challenging, most people get bad therapy and assume that's all that is available.
Services like this can also be infinitely cheaper than real therapists which may cause a supply crisis.
I'm afraid at least this particular example is wrong, and popular media grossly misrepresented what happened:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3AcK7Pcp9D2LPoyR2/ai-87-staying-in-character
(Note that one of links has rotted, but I recall viewing it myself and it supported Zvi's claims)
Anyway, I have a more cynical view of the benefits of therapy than you, seeing it rather well described as a Dodo Bird Verdict. Even relatively empirical/non-woo frameworks like CBT/DBT do rough as well as the insanity underpinning Internal Family Systems:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
Even I have to admit that Freudian nonsense grudgingly beats placebo.
You seem to agree that good therapists are few and far between, but I'd go as far as to say that I'm agnostic between therapy as practiced by a good LLM and the modal human therapist.
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Makes me wonder if you're the Scott Alexander alt because this is clearly a mental health practitioner's opinion. All LLMs go off the rails if you keep talking to them long enough, that's a technical problem to be solved in the next year or two, not a reason that human therapists should have jobs ten years from now. OpenAI has already made it a non-issue by just limiting ChatGPT's context window, you'll see this issue more on models that let you flood the context window until the output quality drops to nothing.
Just FYI, a lot of people would much rather spill their guts to an AI than to another human. Also, one of the most common kinds of stress people face is financial stress, and for these people paying for a therapist will cause more stress than it will ever resolve. Mental health professionals are much more useful to the people that need them most when they are free. Far more people will kill themselves due to not getting expensive human attention than will ever kill themselves because their cybertherapist told them to.
I just can’t get excited for AI therapy because honestly, unless you have literally nobody in your life to talk through things with, there’s no value to therapy. I just don’t see people with long-standing issues get better because they had therapy. In fact, some people have therapy for multiple years without ever getting to the point of not needing therapy anymore.
I’m very much of the Stoic/CBT/Jordan Peterson school of therapy. Over focus on feelings and overthinking problems not only does not work, but quite often makes your original issues much worse. The key to getting better (barring something organically wrong with your brain — and that’s fairly rare) is to get out of your own head and get into taking productive actions to make your life better. Feeling bad about yourself is much better treated by becoming a better person than by sitting around trying to convince yourself that just because you haven’t ever done anything useful doesn’t mean that you’re useless. Get out there and start building, fixing or cleaning things. You’ll get over feeling worthless because you’ll know you did something useful.
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