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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Considering OpenAI's extensive, ahem, alignment efforts, I think using GPT in its current state as a therapist will mostly net you all the current-year (or past-year rather, I think the cutoff is still 2023?) progressive updates and not much beyond that. Suppose you can at least vent to it. Claude is generally better at this but it's very sensitive to self-harm-adjacent topics like therapy, and you may or may not find yourself cockblocked without a decent prompt.

what do people think about therapy becoming AI?

I'm quite optimistic actually, in no small part because my shady source of trial Claude has finally ran dry last month and I hate to say I'm feeling its absence at the moment, which probably speaks to either my social retardation or its apparent effectiveness. I didn't explicitly do therapy with it (corpo models collapse into generic assistant speak as soon as you broach Serious Topics, especially if you use medical/official language like that CIA agent prompt downthread) but comfy text adventures are close enough and I didn't realize how much time I spend on those and how salutary they are until I went cold turkey for a month. Maybe the parable of the earring did in fact have some wisdom to it.

Despite my past shilling I'm so far hypocritically valiantly resisting the masculine urge to cave and pay OpenRouter, I don't think there's any kind of bottom in that particular rabbit hole once you fall in, scouring /g/ is at least more of a trivial inconvenience than paying the drug dealer directly.