Including someone just yesterday who said they’ve STOPPED SEEING THEIR PSYCHOLOGIST and are ONLY USING CHATGPT for therapy now.
This shit is genuinely dangerous. “AI” therapy got me feeling like 
bro fr.
Deteriorating material conditions + expensive mental healthcare options + LLMs that recommend tall bridges to suicidal people, what a fucking great recipe
That’s without even getting into the privacy concerns of telling your deepest feelings and secrets to a fucking chatbot that literally builds a profile on you. Someone else said to me recently that they basically use chatgpt to journal so it knows everything about them and their friends and god knows what else. So yeh, take comfort in the fact that even if you’ve never interacted with this dogshit, it could probably still have a deep profile on you because one of your dumbass friends decided to use it as a diary because LLMs just agree with everything you say and are very validating.
I’ve tried it, kinda. I only skimmed the responses, though, it was more about the act of writing. Expressing things to any kind of reader, even an LLM, forces me to think things through.
I’ve never had a therapist that did anything more than listen and give advice that I could have figured out myself, so I’m not really surprised that ChatGPT is a suitable replacement.
To me, therapy only acts as a necessary prerequisite to receive the medication that actually helps me because the neoliberal order thinks that therapy is a silver bullet to all the world’s ills, like it’s some magical Harry Potter spell.
And most of people’s problems are caused by material conditions that no amount of therapy could ever fix.
And most of people’s problems are caused by material conditions that no amount of therapy could ever fix.
1000%, I think therapy is being leaned on way too much by way too many people because of innate issues in our society.
That being said, a chatbot that tells suicidal people where the nearest tall bridges are is a troubling development in the over-therapisation of our individualist society.
Advice is life coaching, therapy is a lot more involved. A therapist can do both but it just depends on what your needs are. Either way, there’s a lot of class conscious ones out there that can help people navigate the capitalist wasteland. AI won’t ever do that and it can’t replicate human connection.
And if you could have figured it out on your own, then why did it take a therapist for you to get there? Maybe I’m reading too much into your phrasing.
I almost posted this yesterday but didn’t really want to think about it too hard: https://archive.is/gROS5
The author describes how ChatGPT helped her open up about an epilepsy diagnosis and strengthen her relationships. Superficially it seems fine, but there’s so much to unpack, and the more you do the worse it gets. ChatGPT’s responses as quoted in the article were generic “and how does that make you feel” follow-ups. For them to have been revelatory, the author must’ve had zero similar interactions with the people close to her, either because she has thoroughly internalized the idea that we cannot talk about our feelings without being judged or the people around her were so oblivious that she needed to essentially confront them with her lived reality to get a reaction. Or a combination of the two. But I don’t know how you go through that and reach the conclusion wow, ChatGPT is actually good for therapy instead of wow our social relations are so messed up I needed a computer to give me the courage to open up about a medical diagnosis to my own husband
That’s without even getting into the privacy concerns of telling your deepest feelings and secrets to a fucking chatbot that literally builds a profile on you.
Oooooh! This is why the rich and powerful are going all in on this stuff, they might not even think it would be profitable, but like social media, it helps build a perfect advertising profile for someone.
I look forward to the chatbots recommending products to people.
“I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling suicidal, many experts agree that the best solution is the McDonalds Big MacTM meal deal, which comes with fries, a drink, and three 100% chicken breast nuggets, only $14.99 at selected locations near you. Would you like me to put the directions to the nearest McDonalds restaurant into google maps so you can head there right away? Or would you rather I open up DoorDashTM and have the food delivered to you directly, for maximum convenience?”
I would do a sudoku on the spot.
I think rich people genuinely believe this is how they make the rest of us redundant and get to build their robot utopia because all their ML engineers are hyping this technology to the moon because it keeps them employed.
It’s probably a mix of things, the capitalist class isn’t a monolith. Some probably see short term profit because stocks go up, some probably do think this is the start of a “tech utopia” for them, and others probably are actually looking for a genuine commercial value in this stuff. And of course there’s always the ones who view something like this and recognise that they can use it to atomise and alienate the proletariat and use it for social control and manipulation.
fwiw one time I asked one of these chatbots what’s the best way to cure dysphoria aside from transitioning, and it basically described transitioning lol
Never use chatbots.
LLMs just agree with everything you say and are very validating.
I found out this manipulation tactic pretty early. I did check it at first to see what all the fuss was about, and before soon enough I was practically begging the damn thing to criticize me and whatever argument I was making.
It’s the confirmation bias machine.
“'ey chatGPT, write me a best seller book about this guy who’s a lil depressed”
ChatGPT spouting out your entire therapy sessions
it’s not therapy it’s just bitching to something that can never disagree (because if it does you can just tweak it to be more “friendly”), it never gets tired, it never refuses to listen, is always friendly and has no mood, is available 24/7 and only costs a nominal fee. im sorry but if you’re only going to therapy to vent you’re doing something wrong.
granted not all therapists are good and in fact some are just outright worse than chatgpt, but the LLM is just a glorified parrot, everything you tell it to it throws back it you. stop suspending your disbelief it’s not real it’s not human it’s not even intelligent it’s just a number generator that produces words based on some probability. it’ll never let you investigate the root cause of your problems it’ll never push back it’s just not right for this. but who am i kidding people that use AI ain’t gonna read this if they wanted to read a rant they would just ask gpt to write one for them.
it’s not therapy it’s just bitching to something that can never disagree
This is what people want, they’ve been doing the same thing at customer service workers forever without a shred of self reflection.
Every neoliberal subject getting their own personal validation/contradiction amelioration machine is going to turbocharge ideological disintegration even more than social media already has.
I’m just imagining the fresh horrors that will be unleashed when every single person is told “you’re doing a great job, keep it up!” no matter what they’re actually doing, without any connection to humanity or society.
it’s that participation trophy bullshit from back in the day but real
I’m imaging guilty ICE agents and managers and prison guards and industrial techs building bombs for Israel looking to chatbots for validation so they don’t have to grapple with the contradictions of their own job.
Every bit of friction on their psyche smoothed away by a sycophant in their pocket that tells them they shouldn’t blame themselves.
People long for connections with other people that aren’t sporadic or contingent or volatile or shallow. People need so much more support and social contacts than they get and they need so much more time to support and nourish these contacts, but they get neither of them, capitalism as always is burning the candle from both ends, creating ever more unstable life’s and ever more pressure on people, while at the same time taking away any and all ways people would have to deal with them, through social connections and communities. Everyone you know is tired and needs somebody, but everyone you know is also too tired to be that somebody.
ChatGPT is never too busy to answer, ChatGPT never wants to talk about their own feelings, ChatGPT is never going to disagree with you, ChatGPT is never going to go away, ChatGPT doesn’t have any other friends, ChatGPT is never going through it themselves, ChatGPT is never tired, ChatGPT is always there for you.
edit: people’s brains have also been rewired to always expect complete instantaneous responses: we can get almost all entertainment there is within seconds, food delivered within half an hour, Amazon prime delivery the next morning and so on and so on. Writing to a friend and having to wait for them to reply for a day seems so archaic in comparison, especially when all these other much more immediate experiences all come through the same device using the same basic gestures and actions.
I genuinely don’t understand how people end up this way about “AI”. Like I just plainly don’t get it. People are capable of understanding how these machines work, including what they do with your input and the privacy ramifications of that, and figuring out through reason, research and experimentation what good use cases for the technology are — I have myself experimented with LLMs on several occasions, and have determined that I have basically no use for the technology at all, and only a few very limited use cases for other ML-based technologies.
I do not believe myself to be better than other people, nor uniquely capable of making rational decisions about new technologies, and yet here we are: relatives, employers, coworkers and the likes all treating “AI” as a god rather than as a mechanical Turk… But what on Earth drives these people to believe so firmly? We the actors who populate the present day are certainly Children of Troubled Times, it seems.
You interact with it the same way you do most human interaction nowadays, through text chat. And unlike human interaction it’s completely immediate, it has vast amounts of knowledge compared to almost any human and it never tires of interacting with you. It’s always there for you, unlike actual human beings, it “gets to know you” better than most human beings, you can tell it things you wouldn’t tell human beings.
AI will never leave you.
I really don’t think there’s much of a surprise why people are so attracted to these things. As with so many of capitalist inventions, nobody would find a need for these things if we didn’t live in a world in which the chasm between human being gets wider and deeper every day and the weight placed upon them gets heavier and heavier at the same time. The difference between interacting without a real human friend that lives on the other side of the country through text and interacting with ChatGPT might bé neglegible for a lot of people.
That’s certainly the pitch, but that’s not really what it is in practice, is it? It responds to your questions completely immediately, at a clear cost to the environment and even people’s access to water and electricity; it has vast amounts of knowledge, which is to say it possesses knowledge that any human could get from just skimming the first few results of a web search and then confidently bullshitting the rest; it never leaves you nor tires of you, and it’s always by your side, in much the same way as an anime body pillow is; and it gets to know you as you tell it things you’d tell nobody else, because you’re feeding your most sensitive information into foreign data centers, where your information might come up in other people’s chats, if it doesn’t literally get leaked without your consent.
I would see the appeal if it worked exactly as the pitch says, but it doesn’t. People are deluding themselves to their own detriment.
Also, I personally think the superchatbot experience is really underwhelming, the novelty wears off after 5 minutes, and you immediately see the repetition and bullshit information, I really don’t get why this is supposed to be a “revolutionary technology”, I think the biggest impact it will have is companies replacing workers with AI only to crumble under the weight of the most shitty code ever or something. IDK i’m not impressed at all.
People must be very, very lonely if they’re letting them become their entire social life.
the exact same writing style and the memory of someone with a severe TBI
it’s fun for some quick erotica (which also gets boring eventually) or if you are playing Stellaris and want an instant background text for an alien empire you created
People are technically capable of understanding a lot of things they flat out refuse to accept. Actually understanding is hard, making lazy assumptions is easy. Given how much easily debunkable bullshit people believe, people misunderstanding what ai is doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
I do not believe myself to be better than other people, nor uniquely capable of making rational decisions
Yea, same here. People just choose not to. And they choose not to even when its something that matters a lot more then this.
Posts like this continue to make me glad that I haven’t left my rural town. I’ve met like two people who’ve used AI excessively and both were weird tech bros from the city.
I mean this is kinda a weird viewpoint. I’ve lived in a huge city for many many years, and sure I know lots of people who use AI for dumb shit, but I also know tons of people who don’t. Cities are full of quite literally all kinds. So of course those kinds of weirdos are here, every kind of weirdo is here. There’s nothing inherently more pro social about living in a small rural town with a few thousand people than in a city surrounded by a million other people
More like no mental health care options, LLMs can be a great tool, but we are under the most wretched of capital, so it’s going to be Dr. Cyberbot PhD Esq. rather than an automation toy, something to run bad ideas with before presenting them to actual people to further analyze rather than the endpoint as is now, or spell check 2.0.
What really gets me is people are so alienated from themselves and everything around them that they can longer recognize a human response, human manipulation of things, and haven’t in some time, these Markov chain rngs are rather predictive and have certain phrases, grammar, etc as tell idiosyncrasies yet no one can pick them up, the image generation ones have it like the reality check fail hands, bad shading, inconsistent tone, nonsensical deformations, etc, yet I feel like the only one seeing through the weird illusion. LLMs are shit at programming syntax and you can’t simply lift, but people are deluded into thinking they are laborless devices to replace everyone, when really you have all the data workers behind the scenes at non-local LLMs as a 21st century Mechanical Turk tagging your chats away to improve algos, and then these magical machine spirits are still hosted on very physical devices, there is no ether that people seem to think this is pulled of. Like most people not knowing where their food nor utilities come from no one cares about material reality involving other people
Capital vol 2 goes over a lot of automation issues, and its hilarious people never fucking learn, leaning into like those weird AI religious cults nor going full Butlerian Jihad uncle Ted will save you. Then again so is the fool duality the west approaches everything with.
Sad and maybe misguided but good.
