Comment by heinrichhartman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heinrichhartman | Hacker News Reader

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heinrichhartman

> The real question is can they do a better job than no therapist. That's the option people face. > The answer to that question might still be no, but at least it's the right question.

The answer is: YES.

Doing better than nothing is a really low hanging fruit. As long as you don't do damage - you do good. If the LLM just listens and creates a space and a sounding board for reflection is already an upside.

> Until we answer the question "Why can't people get good mental health support?" Anyway.

The answer is: Pricing.

Qualified Experts are EXPENSIVE. Look at the market pricies for good Coaching.

Everyone benefits from having a coach/counseler/therapist. Very few people can afford them privately. The health care system can't afford them either, so they are reserved for the "worst cases" and managed as a parse resource.

> Doing better than nothing is a really low hanging fruit. As long as you don't do damage - you do good.

That second sentence is the dangerous one, no?

It's very easy to do damage in a clinical therapy situation, and a lot of the debate around this seems to me to be overlooking that. It is possible to do worse than doing nothing.

>It is possible to do worse than doing nothing.

Individually or over populations?

If you look at anything individually the answer for anything involving humans is don't do anything at all, ever.

When looking at things statistically actual trends on how dangerous or useful something is will begin to stand out. Lets come up with some completely made up statistics as an example.

"1 out of 10,000 ChatGPT users will commit suicide due to using an LLM for therapy"

sounds terrible, shut it down right.

"2 out of 10,000 people that do not use an LLM or seek professional therapy commit suicide" (again this is imaginary)

Now all of a sudden the application of statistics show that people using LLMs are 50% less likely to kill themselves versus the baseline.

Is this the actual case of how they work, probably not, but we do need more information.

You're assuming the answer is yes, but the anecdotes about people going off the deep end from LLM-enabled delusions suggests that "first, do no harm" isn't in the programming.

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