Chatgpt would have been a better therapist for me than the online therapist I had a few years ago. I really felt like I was talking to a bot that didn’t parse the things I was saying.
I am horrified of how easily we are dismissing things that are super hard because "ai can do it better". Therapy is one of those things were result vary widely and depend on the patient, the therapist and the setting. You ain't gonna get that from a machine - not with the way we are doing AI today.
Because, yeah, I don’t trust humans to program an AI that I could ever trust, unless the model and training data are all made fully available for independent analysis.
Tweaking the model would be telling it to favor certain paradigms over others.
Either way, therapy will be useless. Also, IMHO we are at least 500 years from anything that resembles AGI - if it ever happens.
Trust isn’t just about “I can tell this person anything”, but also trust that the therapist understands me well enough to ask me the right questions, contextual to my experience in life, and in therapy. Trust that they are looking at my facial expressions and are noticing when I’m in distress even if I don’t realize I am in that moment. Trust that the person I’m speaking to has dedicated their life to help/support others, and that the things I say aren’t all being fed to some system that is analyzing every word.
Obviously YMMV, and this depends on why you’re in therapy, but one of the things that I’m deeply grateful for in therapy is that I know the person I’m speaking to deeply cares.
Maybe a bot can someday fill in for those times when you just need to have a conversation with someone other than yourself, or want someone to identify and help you see the thinking traps you’re falling into.
But I can’t help but feel such a bot should not be thought of as a therapist, any more than Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” feature should be considered fully autonomous. I think it’s a misnomer.
Therapy for me is like, a psychic connection. I take someone deep into my headspace and they help me sort things out, exploring the inside of my mind. ChatGPT just makes that a loopback, a mirror that lets me see my mind in a new light sometimes. A real, useful therapist.. it's not scientific, but there's a connection I feel, and the possibility of emotions and thoughts being transmitted across. a human connection.
And I think it’s worth mentioning that “not scientific” just means science does not currently have much to say about the mechanisms in play, which is meaningful difference from a conclusion that there’s anything “woo woo” going on.
Mirror neurons are fascinating.
It's one thing to like the idea of a super A.I. that does therapy, but I don't think ChatGPD can do basic things like ask you how your progress has been since last week's session.
Good vs bad you can solve with properly curated ratings from clients.
How to get through to you seems a harder problem. Sometimes it clicks and sometimes it’s a thud.
I just tried asking it to be a tough guy ex gang member therapist from the bronx who became a therapist and while it introduced itself that way it quickly dropped the personality and recited generic therapy advise.
I told it I was afraid of spiders. After it gave some advice and dropped the bronx character I asked it "Have you ever been scared of anything?"
And it said "As a machine learning model, I do not have personal experiences or emotions." Which shows it is not flexible.