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Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

Kind of fascinating that the benefit here is not so much artificial intelligence as artificial empathy.

ML models in general are not great when tasked with rigid stuff. Stable diffusion can make a cool picture, but getting it to make exactly the picture you had in mind is mostly impossible.

This is actually a great use case in the sense that the requirements are flexible, it just has to be something empathetic and directionally related. That bar is so much lower than a trustworthy diagnosis or even a document lookup, either of which can be right or wrong. When what you need is "an example of x", this technology is great.

So much for hyper-advanced robots knowing pi to a million places but not being able to process this thing you call "love".

They've even got this thing we call "bullshit" down pat.

I suppose really that's one of the big benefits of LLMs for everything. They're a friend who always has the time and willingness to try and help.

> Kind of fascinating that the benefit here is not so much artificial intelligence as artificial empathy.

In their book "The Elephant in the Brain", Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson argue that a large subset of health care is already something like that: conspicuous caring with little benefits other than social signaling and feeling that one's being care for. [1]

[1]: https://johnathanbi.com/book-notes-summaries/notes-on-elepha...

"here's a squeeze ball. go sit outside and squeeze it."

All cynicism aside, there's vastly more in the collective writings of humans on empathy than medicine.

See my sibling comment just posted, I don't belive that's relevant. You can always screw up facts, it's a high bar. A loosely constrained example of an empathetic speech much easier. Despite the fact that medicine deals in facts (and this would hold true for an even more black and white discipline) so all you need in principle to learn from are a few examples, while empathy is much more subtle and would require a representation to be learned from many varied examples.

> the fact that medicine deals in facts

medicine benefits from facts, but is largely based on experienced, expert opinion

And experience is the practical contact with and observation of facts, over an extended period.

Most English dictionaries explicitly separate out “formal judgment by an expert” as a distinct meaning for “opinion” from the more common meaning of personal subjective no-facts-needed belief.

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