- the insight into your mind that a private for profit company gets is immense and potentially very damaging when weaponized (either through a “whoops we got hacked” moment or intentionally for the next level of adtech)
- chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?
Therapy isn't magic always-correct advice either. It's about shifting your focus, attitudes, thought patterns through social influence, not giving you the right advice on each and every step.
Even if it's just whatever, being heard out in a nonjudgmental manner, acknowledged, prompted to reflect, does a lot of good.
> chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?
As someone on a long-term therapy journey, I would be far less concerned about this. Therapy is rarely about doing exactly what one is told, it's about exploring your own thought processes. When a session does involve some piece of advice, or "do xyx for <benefit>", that is rarely enough to make it happen. Knowing something is good and actually doing it are two very different things, and it is exploring this delta that makes therapy valuable (in my personal experience).
At some point, as that delta shrinks and one starts actually taking beneficial actions instead of just talking, the advice becomes more of a reminder / an entry point to the ground one has already covered, not something that could be considered prescriptive like "take this pill for 7 days".
The point I'm trying to make is that if ChatGPT is the therapist, it doesn't make the person participating into a monkey who will just execute every command. Asking the bot to provide suggestions is more about jogging one's own thought processes than it is about carrying out specific tasks exactly as instructed.
I do wonder how someone who hasn't worked with a therapist would navigate this. I could see the value of a bot like this as someone who already understands how the process works, but I could absolutely see a bot being actively harmful if it's the only support someone ever seeks.
My first therapist was actively unhelpful due to lack of trauma-awareness, and I had to find someone else. So I could absolutely see a bot being unhelpful if used as the only therapeutic resource. On the flip side, ChatGPT might actually be more trauma-"aware" than some therapists, so who knows.
> Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says.
I'm not sure how literally to take that sentence, but it's worrisome.
My stance here is based on an optimistic outlook that a person seeking therapeutic advice is by doing so demonstrating enough awareness that they’re probably capable of recognizing a good idea from a bad one.
I realize this can get into other territory and there are very problematic failure modes in the worst cases.
Regarding “My life is better if I just do what it says.”, I think concern is a fair reaction and I don’t think the author fully thought that through. But at the same time, it’s entirely possible that it’s true (for now).
If someone continues to follow advice that is clearly either bad or not working, then it becomes concerning.
But that was the other point of my anecdote. It became pretty clear to me what wasn’t working, even at a time that I wasn’t really sure how the whole thing worked.
Do you think you are somehow special? Just create a burner account and ask it what you want, everything it gets told, it's seen thousands of times over, does chatGPT or some data scientist somewhere really care that there is someone somewhere that is struggling with body issues, struggling in a relationship or struggling to find meaning in there lives? There are literally millions of people in the world with the same issue.
The only time it might be a little embarrassing is if this info got leaked to friends and family with my name attached to it, else I don't get the problem, it seems to me people have an over inflated sense of self importance, nobody cares.
If i worked at openAI and had full access to everyones chats, I would get bored within five minutes and not even want to read anymore.
Yes, obviously.
But that's not what I'm worried about personally. I'm worried about the weaponization of this data in the future, either from OpenAI's greed to create the next advertising money-printing machine or from the data leaking through a breach. And because the interface with ChatGPT is so "natural" and "human like", it's easy to trust it and talk to it like a friend divulging very personal information about yourself.
Imagine OpenAI (or whatever other AI) used the confidences you made to it or the specifics of your "therapy" sessions with it to get you to act in a certain way or buy certain things. Would you be comfortable with that? Well, that's irrelevant because they have the data already and can use it. Kinda like Cambdridge Analytica but on steroids because tailoring it to anyone's particular biases and way of thinking becomes trivial with ChatGPT and friends.
Seeing how cavalier OpenAI has been with last week's breach and how fast they've flipped from being apparently benevolent to what they are now. And it's only been a few months of ChatGPT being available to the public.
Not that much different from the current fingerprint techniques, it's just that on steroids but I don't understand the issue.
We don't know the potential for this nascent technology either. I'm personally very concerned about the potential for manipulating people on a very personal basis since the cost of doing so is cents with LLMs vs orders of magnitude more when using a troll farm (the "state of the art" until ChatGPT3+ came around)
Some of us just don't appreciate being manipulated and influenced to further someone else's agenda that is detrimental to ourselves I suppose.
It's scary how these services are being so casually adopted, even by tech-minded people. Sure, they're convenient _now_, but there's no guarantee how your data will be used in the future. If anything, we need to be much more privacy conscious today, given how much personal information we're likely to share.
Using it as a therapist is absolutely terrifying.
The best deception is one where the victim is self-motivated to believe it.
No one is going to actually read them, but try "ChatGPT-5, please compile a list of the ChatGPT-4 users most likely to [commit terrorism/subscribe to Hulu/etc]"
Not the tool nor data scientists, but advertisers are salivating at the chance to even further improve their microtargetted campaigns. If they can deliver ads to you for a specific product _at the moment you need it_, their revenues will explode.
Consider this hypothetical conversation:
> Oh, Tina, I'm feeling hopeless today. Please cheer me up.
> Certainly, Michael! Here's a joke: ...
> Also, if you're feeling really sad, maybe you should try taking HappyPills(tm). They're a natural mood enhancer that can help when times get tough. Here's a link where you can buy some: ...
If you don't think such integrated ads will become a reality, take a look at popular web search result pages today. Search engines started by returning relevant results from their web index. Now they return ad-infested pages of promoted content. The same thing has happened on all social media sites. AI tools are the new frontier that will revolutionize how ads are served. To hell with all that.
I'd be interested in how GPT answers that question.
Although i've been running a ChatGPT 4 space via hugging face that doesn't need a AI key or an account, so there is nothing linking it to me.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/yuntian-deng/ChatGPT4
There are a few you can find by searching ChatGPT4 if it gets busy, also this allows you to run GPT 4 for free which is only for plus members right now.
What if you talk to a human, and their advice is wrong or makes you worse off in the long term, because they're just repeating something they heard somewhere?
Here's my advice: Don't accept my advice blindly, humans make mistakes too.
In this discussion, a human has studied psychology and has diplomas or certifications to prove it, an ethics framework it must follow, and responsibility for its mistakes. ChatGPT has none of that, it just regurgitates something it got from the Internet's wisdom or something it invented altogether.
I'm not saying humans are never wrong, but at least their reasoning isn't a black box unlike ChatGPT and other LLMs.
Additionally there's something called the replication crisis in the social sciences (psychology included) which is basically to the effect of a major discovery that most of these "black box" studies can not be reproduced. When someone runs the same experiment the results are all different.
It goes to show that either many of the studies were fraudulent or statistical methodologies are flawed or both.
Given that chatGPT therapeutic data is ALSO derived from the same training data I would say it's ok to trust chatGPT as much as you would trust psychologists. Both have a lot of bullshit with nuggets of truth.
How exactly?