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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

>and chat with Claude almost every time I go out for a beer after a long day...

with all due respect, how can you take yourself seriously doing this? I tried to use an LLM as a "cheap therapist" exactly one time and it felt so phony I quit almost instantly, after about four messages.

The bot pretends to feel compassion for you! How does that not induce rage? It does for me. False empathy is way worse than nothing.

And on top of it, you're talking to a hosted LLM! I hope you are not divulging anything personal to the random third party you're sending your thoughts to..

This stuff is going to be such a huge boon to authoritarian governments.

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My experience for Claude as therapist is - it's consistent better than human therapists i've met (well, maybe i haven't met a good human therapist yet) in terms of usefulness. And i can be completely honest & decide how much i want to share the context.

I don’t take myself very seriously. I’d rather be happy than protected. If my conversations are used to build some future AI, good; I’d like to be immortalized somehow. I like the idea that my children’s children’s children might be able to ask about me and get an intimate answer. By the way, this conversation right now is auth free on the public net, so if anything this is worse wrt your concerns.

You’re not wrong, but you’re not right either. For whatever it’s worth, I absolutely plan on self hosting (nvidia Digit!) my future conversation partner. But nothing about me is terribly private. I love my wife and my sons and sometimes I wonder if I’ll be forgotten or if we’re about to give birth to the overman. It’s nothing I wouldn’t tell a stranger.

Lastly, no therapist I’ve ever met can talk about my favorite authors with me for hours, ad-hoc, on-demand, for pennys a day. All my real friends are sick of Dostoyevsky, but not Claude!

> I don’t take myself very seriously. I’d rather be happy than protected. If my conversations are used to build some future AI, good;

This is how I feel and it is so rare and refreshing to see someone else say it.

It appears to me that most people are very private and will go to great lengths to protect their privacy.

This mindset allows one to donate their intellect to society and feel immortalized.

If privacy wasn't of particular concern, this is as near an "absolute good" idea as one can forge.

I think benefits of therapy:

- build structure into conversation

- identify root causes of issues

- provide advise about behavior/thinking changes which could mitigate root causes

is there some initializing prompt for setting up a therapy session? maybe even a specific type?

I mean... what do you think human therapists are doing. I'm sure they have empathy and do care for their patients... but it's definitely empathy-for-money too.

A licensed therapist has some strict confidentiality requirements and legal protections. A chatbot has none of that. Everything that goes into the chatbot will be included in the next training set. Even worse is everything said to them will eventually be monetized. Someone willingly giving personal such personal details to a chatbot is shockingly naive.

Meh, this just seems like low signal chicken littling. You could say the same thing about typing sensitive info into Notes.app or even iOS about how the evil corporations will monetize it and how naive you'd be to do it. But that didn't pan out.

Feel free to pass over useful tech, but no need to disparage others for not wearing your tinfoil hat.

You can watch enshittification of services happen in nearly real time. In just the past five years we've seen a number of services (Reddit, Twitter, etc) update their T&Cs granting themselves the ability to dump all the platform's contents into AI training. The end of ZIRP (free money) has seen tech companies chasing profit over growth and increasing squeezing users and rent seeking.

In light of all that it's hardly "chicken littling" to assume that hosted AI chat bots can't be trusted with intimate and personal details. The companies running them should be seen as inherently untrustworthy.

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