But for people lacking the wealth or living in areas with no access to human tutors, LLMs are a godsend.
I expect the same is true for therapy.
I actually think cheap tutoring is one of the best cases for LLMs. Go look at what Khan academy is doing in this space. So much human potential is wasted because parents can't afford to get their kids the help they need with school. A properly constrained LLM would be always available to nudge the student in the right direction, and identify areas of weakness.
I had difficulty with math as a kid and well into college (ironic given my profession), and one of the big issues was the examples always skip some steps, often multiple steps. I lost countless hours staring blankly at examples, referencing lecture notes that weren't relevant, googling for help that at best partially answered my specific question, sometimes never getting the answer in time and just accepting that I'd get that one wrong on the homework.
An LLM, if it provides accurate responses (big "IF"), would have saved me tons of time. Similarly today, for generic coding questions I can have it generate examples specific to my problem, instead of having to piece solutions together from generic documentation.
"...for people lacking the wealth or living in areas with no access to decent housing, unmaintained dangerous apartment buildings are a godsend."
Why is it ok to expect poor people to be endangered and suffer through indignity just for the "crime" of being poor?
1. Nothing
2. Something slightly better
3. Something excellent
Maybe you should consider that an understanding of these alternatives is completely compatible with wanting the best outcome for everyone and that, in the absence of situation 3, situation 2 is better than nothing.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/ai-therapy-bots-fuel-delu...
I’ve helped pay for a few appointments for her, but she says that ChatGPT can also provide a little validation in the mean time.
If used sparingly I can see the point, but the problems start when the sycophantic machine will feed whatever unhealthy behaviors or delusions you might have, which is how some of the people out there that'd need a proper diagnosis and medication instead start believing that they’re omnipotent or that the government is out to get them, or that they somehow know all the secrets of the universe.
For fun, I once asked ChatGPT to roll along with the claim that “the advent of raytracing is a conspiracy by Nvidia that involved them bribing the game engine developers, in an effort to make old hardware obsolete and to force people to buy new products.” Surprisingly, it provided relatively little pushback.
It's not that far from the truth. Both Nvidia and AMD have remunerative relationships with game and engine developers to optimise games for their hardware and showcase the latest features. We didn't get raytraced versions of Portal and Quake because the developers thought it would be fun, we got them because money changed hands. There's a very fuzzy boundary between a "commercial partnership" and what most people might consider bribery.
Bribery isn't really needed. Working with their industry contacts to make demos to promote their new features is the second half of the business model.
To be frank - as someone who did not have a SAT tutor, and coming from a culture where no one did and all got very good/excellent SAT scores: No one really needs a SAT tutor. They don't provide more value then good SAT prep books. I can totally see a good LLM be better than 90% of SAT tutors out there.