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Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

> no judgement

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.

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Reading between the lines I think a key part of what makes chatbots attractive, re lack of judgment, is they're like talking to a new stranger every session.

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.

Agreed/that’s a good take.

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.

Also important is simply that the AI is not human.

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.

The problem with this is they are practicing like medical providers without any quality assurance or controls to ensure they are behaving appropriately.

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”

Kind of reminds me of an interview question that a friend of mine suggested for when I conduct interviews: Pick your favorite/strongest language. How would you rate yourself, where 0 is "complete newbie" and 10 is "I invented the language"?

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.

Sounds like a bad question then, no?

I wouldn't trust ChatGPT to help someone in a mental health crisis, but I would be glad to find out my dad had started using Claude Sonnet to process his transition into retirement. I believe Sonnet would encourage a user to seek professional help when appropriate, too. In my experience, genuinely good therapists are hard to find--probably 75% of them are going to be strictly worse than Sonnet.

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