The value of a good therapist is having an empathetic third party to help you make good judgements about your life and learn how to negotiate your needs within a wider social context.
Depending on the needs people are trying to get met and how bad the people around them are, a little bit of a self directed chatbot validation session might help them feel less beat down by life and do something genuinely positive. So I’m not necessarily opposed to what people are doing with them/in some cases it doesn’t seem that bad.
But calling that therapy is both an insult to genuinely good therapists and dangerous to people with genuine mental/emotional confusion or dysregulation that want help. Anyone with a genuinely pathological mental state is virtually guaranteed to end up deeper in whatever pathology they’re currently in through self directed conversations with chatbots.
In both IRL and online discussions sometimes a stranger is the perfect person to talk to about certain things as they have no history with you. In ideal conditions for this they have no greater context about who you are and what you've done which is a very freeing thing (can also be taken advantage of in bad faith).
Online and now LLMs add an extra freeing element, assuming anonymity: they have no prejudices about your appearance/age/abilities either.
Sometimes it's hard to talk about certain things when one feels that judgment is likely from another party. In that sense chatbots are being used as perfect strangers.
Again, I think they have utility as a “perfect stranger” as you put it (if it stays anonymous), or “validation machine” (depending on the sycophancy level), or “rubber duck”.
I just think it’s irresponsible to pretend these are doing the same thing skilled therapists are doing, just like I think it’s irresponsible to treat all therapists as equivalent. If you pretend they’re equivalent you’re basically flooding the market with a billion free therapists that are bad at their job, which will inevitably reduce the supply of good therapists that never enter the field due to oversaturation.
We all know that however "non-judgmental" another human claims to be, they are having all kinds of private reactions and thoughts that they aren't sharing. And we can't turn off the circuits that want approval and status from other humans (even strangers), so it's basically impossible not to mask and filter to some extent.
Therapy is already a bit of grey zone… you can have anyone from a psychologist, a social worker, an untrained deacon, etc “counseling” you. This is worse.
Hell, I’ve been a coach in different settings - players will ask for advice about all sorts of things. There’s a line where you have to say “hey, this is over my head”
My friend, an EXTREMELY competent C++ programmer, rates himself 4/10 because he knows what he doesn't know.
I've interviewed people who rated themselves 9 or 10/10 but couldn't remember how their chosen language did iteration.
You can find influencers on tiktok recommending all kinds of terrible ideas and getting thousands of likes. That's not a very reliable metric. I wouldn't put a lot of faith in a teenage girl's assessment of AI therapy after just one week either, and I certainly wouldn't use that assessment to judge the comparative effectiveness of all human therapists.
I'd also expect ChatGPT to build profiles on people who use it, to use the insights and inferences from that collected data against the user in various ways, to sell that data in some form to third parties, to hand that data over to the state, to hallucinate wildly and unpredictably, and to outright manipulate/censor AI's responses according to ChatGPT's own values and biases or those of anyone willing to pay them enough money.
It's a lot easier to pay a large amount of money to ChatGPT so that the AI will tell millions of vulnerable teenage girls that your product is the solution to their exact psychological problems than it is to pay large amounts of money to several million licensed therapists scattered around the globe.
Maybe you think that ChatGPT is unfailingly ethical in all ways and would never do any of those things, but there are far more examples of companies who abandoned any commitment to ethics they might have started with than there are companies who never got once greedy enough to do those types of things and never ever got bought up by someone who was. I suppose you'd also have to think they'll never have a security breach that would expose the very private information being shared and collected.
Handing over your highly sensitive and very personal medical data to the unlicensed and undependable AI of a company that is only looking for profit seems extremely careless. There are already examples of suicides being attributed to people seeking "therapy" from AI, which has occasionally involved that AI outright telling people to kill themselves. I won't deny that the technology has the potential to do some good things, but every indication is that replacing licensed therapists with spilling all your secrets to a corporate owned and operated AI will ultimately lead to harm.
The above issue, whilst relevant and worth factoring, doesn’t disprove this claim IMO.
Healthcare is about to radically change. Well, everything is now that we have real, true AI. Exciting times.
Oh and inserts ads into conversations. Great.
Are you sure you don't have browser malware?