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I've been rather miserable since I've gotten here, for a multitude of reasons, which had notably dampened my appetite for chatting up my day job online. I'm slightly less miserable right now, which is why I'm back at it! I can elaborate in DMs if you'd like.
I raised objections against claims made exceedingly uncritically in the Guardian post you linked to (having assumed you endorsed it). For example-
I can cut a grieving mother some slack, but the facts don't bear out her beliefs, and the Guardian doesn't really do much journalism here, since it would otherwise suggest her suit is unfounded.
Your personal claims seem more subtle, but even then, I find it very hard to blame the chatbot for social withdrawal here. I'd point out you can make the same argument for anything from reading books to watching anime (a bullet that some may bite, of course). In other words, a potential refuge for the maladjusted, but also something that the majority of people would be loathe to ask others to consume less of or ban altogether, on the grounds that it's a net negative.
(I think the case for social media being far worse for teenage mental health is significantly more robust, and I still wouldn't advocate for it to be banned. In the case of chatbots, I haven't been nudged out of the null hypothesis.)
Imagine the chatbot was replaced by, idk, a Runescape girlfriend (do kids these days have those? Potentially substitute for someone grooming them on Discord), would you expect said person to be significantly more helpful, or at least worthy of blame? I wouldn't.
I'll have to see if it's relevant to the MRCPsych syllabus, God knows that having an unpleasant time with the subject makes most reading on it feel unpleasant :(
A fair point. But I contend that an AI therapist is capable of doing those things, in a limited but steadily improving fashion. You can have a natural language spoken conversation with ChatGPT, and it's very capable of picking up minor linguistic nuance and audio cues. Soon enough, there'll be plug and play digital avatars for it. But I think that therapy through the medium of text works better than doing nothing, and that's the standard I'm judging chatbots by. Not to mention that they're ~free for the end user
God knows what the standards for AGI are these days, with the goalpost having moved to being somewhere near a Lagrange point, but I would sincerely advocate the hot take that an LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet is smarter, more emotionally intelligent and a better conversationalist than the average human, and maybe the average licensed therapist.
It is, of course, hobbled by severe retrograde amnesia, and being stuck to text behind a screen, but those are solvable problems.
To run with your analogy, an AI therapist/teacher is far closer to a human therapist/teacher than they are to a manual or textbook! You can actually talk to them, and with Hlynka not being around, the accusations of stochastic parrotry in these parts has dropped precipitously.
What I'm really advocating for is not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, though I'd certainly deny that human therapists are perfect. I still think that access to AI therapists is better than not, and I'm ambivalent when putting them up against the average human one.
Though I'd also caveat that Character AI probably cheaps out, using significantly dumber models than SOTA. But it's not the only option.
Will message you.
And yeah no doubt the media fucking sucks.
My fear is that people will engage in HER style stuff and this example is a bleeding edge version of that.
McWilliams is useful even if you are just skimming the personality disorder chapters because you will have colleagues with those. It's also interesting enough to make you go through it at pace haha.
I think things like your therapist looking at you like you are an idiot and you going "yeah I know" are underrated parts of therapy and the chatbot isn't going to do those things for now.
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