domain:savenshine.com
Throwaway05
8m ago
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.
charles
19m ago
A group chat that has competent people who are tied in with various industries and specialties in various fields.
These are mostly in private Discords now. Its been one of the worst things to happen to the internet in the last decade, as much as I like Discord personally. Trying to find the answer to even a simple question on anything on the open internet is 90% scammers, click bait, and people that make you scroll past 10+ ads for the answer to a yes-or-no question.
Lizzardspawn
20m ago
I was joking couple of months ago that when guys need therapy they need to do with their best friend two hours of hiking, two hours of lifting, two porterhouse steaks and two bottles of bourbon.
hydroacetylene
21m ago
Therapy is probably worse than talking to a parent/pastor/friend, because therapists are paid strangers who’ve been trained to see every problem primarily in terms of feelings.
aardvark2
26m ago
How do you ever use them for therapy? I tried to use chatgpt3.5 for roleplay, set up command for rewind which are too complex for it. If it misunderstood me, and i corrected it, it wss still in a "poisoned" state, and often it tended to forget at all that it supposed to do
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26m ago
I’m every bit in favor of a sane policy on immigration. We’d probably have a better handle on illegal migration if it were plausible to get into the country legally with a reasonable record and work history and no criminal record. Our current process is long and drawn out and doesn’t allow people to immigrate quickly. If the choice is a 5-10 year wait or hop the fence, I don’t think you can act shocked when a lot of people jump the fence. At the same time, I don’t think it’s sustainable to have millions of people come in, then throw up your hands and act shocked when people whose town population doubled in the last year with people who don’t speak English want them rounded up. Our system is the dumbest most convoluted thing I can think of, topped with zero effort at enforcement. If you’re here illegally, you can basically do whatever you want with no worries. And eventually you get amnesty and thus you get to apply for citizenship and all that comes with it. Insane.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
37m ago
Does regular therapy actually do more than that? Most of the value (unless you’re literally diagnosed with a real mental disorder) is in hearing yourself talk about the problem. It’s probably no better or worse than talking to a friend or clergy or a parent. Even journaling generally helps to get things off your chest and often just putting down on paper the stuff that happened or that’s in your head can give you insight.
MathWizard
Good things are good
46m ago
Fine. It sounds like we don't disagree about any object level issues, just the meaning of certain words and phrases. I don't think what you said originally properly conveys the nuance of what you're saying now, but I understand you now and I don't disagree.
TheFooder
50m ago
What's the mechanism for useful therapy? Is it hearing good advice from an actual human, or is it hearing advice that unlocks subconscious truth? I'd suspect the latter in which case LLM's may be perfectly suitable, particularly for people who don't want to reveal their inner darkness to another person. However, maybe revealing one's innermost thoughts to a living judge is what gives the therapy depth and meaning.
Supah_Schmendrick
51m ago
Yeah, that kind of grasping behavior is not virtuous of the acquaintances. Asking a friend of means if they are able to help is not wrong; implying that you are owed it is bad manners.
Ethan
Quality assurance
59m ago
But the US military do have powerful radars and cameras pointed at the skies. They have lots of space assets, they are very interested in space.
To build, maintain, and coordinate these interests would imply a great deal of cerebral endowment. You may become king of the skies by luck, but you sure as hell don't keep the kingdom that way.
aiislove
1hr ago
I occasionally use an LLM (LLaMA) as a therapist. If I’m feeling upset or have a specific psychological issue I want to get a better perspective on I will just go on there and explain my situation and ask for answers in a style I like (usually just asking them to respond as a therapist or an evo psych perspective or something like that.) When it gives me an answer that is too woke I will just say that the answer sounds ideologically motivated and I’d rather it would tell me the hard truth or a different perspective and 90% of the time it will give me a less annoying answer. I have done real therapy a handful of times in my life and the experiences have ranged from very annoying to somewhat helpful, I don’t like speaking honestly about myself to other people and especially not professional strangers. So I prefer to speak to an ai who can’t judge me and which doesn’t make me feel like I have to judge myself when sharing as well.
I can be creative with the prompting as well which I like, like I can think of whatever character or personality I’d want to get advice from and with a short prompt the ai can mimic whatever perspective I want.
I see it as useful for me, as a grown man who understands how ai and therapy are meant to work broadly, but I don’t think it should replace real therapy for most people (like children or the elderly or normal people who are fine with talking to human beings.)
Tequilamockingbird’s point below about the ai providing validation seems valid though. I could easily prompt the ai to just agree with whatever I’m saying and always tell me I’m right and everyone else is wrong so I try to avoid that failure mode, rather seeking more objective views or explanations of my issues rather than just what would make me feel more right.
Also there's a narrative that everyone is broken or suffering from trauma in some form and thus EVERYONE needs 'healing' to manage their lives. And people who deny needing healing are the most broken of all! So they work from the assumption that anyone who hasn't gone to therapy must be broken, and thus therapy will help fix things... even if that person had a perfectly normal, healthy upbringing.
I say this as somebody who used Therapy to get over a bad breakup. It helped me work through some things, get my emotions out, process my own role in the events and my own personal failings and then... get back to real life quicker. Its a tool! If it works, you should eventually be able to stop using it.
But end of the day it led me to conclude that I'm doing almost everything 'right' and have an accurate world model and generally a normal response to life events... and its EVERYONE ELSE who needs to get their shit together.
This Eliezer Yudkowsky tweet lives in my head rent free.
I think a lot of people use the need for therapy or the fact that they're in therapy as an excuse to not address actual life circumstances that are holding them back.
And by the same token, if their therapist isn't pushing them to address or change their life circumstances, they're probably just there to collect a check and make the person feel like they're doing something constructive.
I don't know if LLM therapists will suggest actual proactive steps to improve life circumstances.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
I am reminded of the 4chan greentext about the anon who hires a prostitute to talk to about his problems because her hourly rate is cheaper than his insurance copay for a real therapist.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Jim is an idiot who has to position himself as the edgiest guy in the room. I don’t understand why you find him credible.
Crowstep
1hr ago
I think it's probably that people just have fewer friends and social interactions now. Therapy has jumped in to fill the gap that socialising, communal worship, hobbies and sports have left. Combine that with safetyism and I can see how we'd end up with a situation where a young person feels lonely or like his life lacks meaning and will end up talking to a state sanctioned professional, when what he really needs is to hang out with his friends more.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1hr ago
Therapy is inherently opinionated. I can't see an LLM offering any deep insights because deep insights are sharp and cutting. LLMs are soft.
But, They are good for Reddit tier sanity checks. "My parents used to beat me within an inch of my life. Is that abuse?"; Yeah, an LLM will help with that. But so will Reddit. LLMs can be especially useful here if it is too embarrassing to post even as an Anon.
Overall, It serves as a great 'intake specialist' and friend. Not so much therapist. Great resouce for intial direction and to riff off. Emotional or otherwise.
I wouldnt trust it past that point.
TequilaMockingbird
1hr ago
Barring a the development and deployment of true Ian Banks-esque AGI I think that it's an absolutely terrible idea that will harm than help.
Unfortunately the very qualities that make existing generative AIs a terrible therapist are also likely to make them a popular choice as one, as IME most lower-functioning individuals don't want "help" as much as they want validation.
So in the interests of "success" (from the pov of people selling AI therapy) that will be the focus of the training data, as without model permenance and/or a functional theory of mind, things like accountability and the identifying of underlying issues will be largely of the table.
5434a
1hr ago
The other, more culture war issue, is that due to the way RLHF works, they will likely be pushing one ideological lens over another. Especially about deep topics like morality, relationships, casual sex, etc.
I'd assume most therapists would hold to similar ideological lenses unless you sought out a therapist directly and explicitly sponsored by a church or similar institution.
I think if the AI could hold a memory of previous discussions it would probably be as good as any therapist in most aspects, possibly better because it's available 24/7 at a low price, but possibly worse in minor aspects in that it can't read the unspoken cues of body language, vocal tenor, implicit context etc and it can't sympathetically offer a box of tissues and a cup of tea. This is assuming the patient is actively engaged and moderately literate and intelligent enough to be able to guide their own sessions. I expect less able patients would need the kind of prompting and closer attention that is more suited to an IRL interaction.
I also expect there are big blind spots I'm missing like how to transfer "notes" from online sessions to an IRL therapist, or how to alleviate a crisis that rises above an initial need to talk things over.
Of course there's also the risk of someone who is already mentally unstable talking to a fake person that's been programmed to be agreeable, but if AI therapy was properly established in its own right I assume it would be operating under a custom prompt to better tune it to the task.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
What is the obsession of Americans (and unfortunately younger Gen Zs in Europe too) with therapy?
Anyway my opinion is - LLM delivered quackery will be as efficient as the human one. But at least will be substantially cheaper.
yunyun333
2hr ago
So is he part of said 'transition team' or does he just have the ear of someone on it?
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Why on earth would you talk to either therapists or AI for advice? The ordering of who to go to should be something like elders->good friends->randos->the denizens of your dreams->homeless crack addicts->unfeeling algorithms->anyone who charges for advice.
More now than when? I agree with you on some level (what you say seems undoubtedly true at least in terms of real-world interactions as opposed to say, MMPORPG or whatever) but as someone who was a kid in the 70s and teen in the 80s there was a lot of therapy talk even then. Maybe just in Hollywood? Because I have some pathology where I remember things, I recall clearly the lines from the 1989 film Sex, Lies and Videotape:
The talk therapy boom, at least in the US, arguably seems to have started from the mid 20th century (when "shellshock"morphed into PTSD) and has just ballooned since then. I'll be the first to say I'm out of touch with current US norms, but I certainly remember the ethos of "Talk it out" even from childhood.
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