Good. It's difficult to imagine a worse use case for LLMs.
The more you tell an AI not to obsess about a thing, the more they obsess about it. So trying to make a model that will never tell people to self harm is futile.
Though maybe we are just doing in wrong, and the self-filtering should be external filtering - one model to censor results that do not fit, and one to generate results with lighter self-censorship.
[1] https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai
[2] If you need /s here to be sure, perhaps it's time for some introspection
And frankly, it's not even clear to me that a human therapist is any better. Yeah, maybe the guard-rails are in place but I'm not convinced that if those are crossed it'd result in some sociately consequences. Let people explorer their mind and experience--at the end of the day, I suspect they'd be healthier for it.
A big point of therapy is helping the patient better ascertain reality and deal with it. Hopefully, the patient learns how to reckon with their mind better and deceive themselves less. But this requires an entity that actually exists in the world and can bear witness. LLMs, frankly, don’t deal with reality.
I’ll concede that LLMs can give people what they think therapy is about: lying on a couch unpacking what’s in their head. But this is not at all the same as actual therapeutic modalities. That requires another person that knows what they’re doing and can act as an outside observer with an interest in bettering the patient.
People were able to write about their feelings and experiences before the invention of a chat bot that tells you everything that you wrote is true. Like you could do that in notepad or on a piece of paper and it was free
I can't imagine some therapists, especially remote only, aren't already just acting as a human interface to chatgtp as well.
Are you joking? Any medical professional caught doing this should lose their license.
I would be incensed if I was a patient in this situation, and would litigate. What you're describing is literal malpractice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1xrNaTO1bI
and given price of proper therapy is skyrocketing.
On the other hand, I could image some more narrow uses where an LLM could help.
For example, in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, there are different methods that are pretty prescriptive, like identifying cognitive distortions in negative thoughts. It's not too hard to imagine an app where you enter a negative thought on your own and exercise finding distortions in it, and a specifically trained LLM helps you find more distortions, or offer clearer/more convincing versions of thoughts that you entered yourself.
I don't have a WaPo subscription, so I cannot tell which of these two very different things have been banned.
It would still need a therapist to set you on the right track for independent work, and has huge disadvantages compared to the current state-of-the-art, a paper worksheet that you fill out with a pen.
Yes?
If you go looking to psychopaths and LLMs for empathy, you're touching a hot stove. At some point, you're going to get burned.
Expert system. You want an expert system. For example, a database mapping "what patients write" to "what patients need to hear", a fuzzy search tool with properly-chosen thresholding, and a conversational interface (repeats back to you, paraphrased – i.e., the match target –, and if you say "yes", provides the advice).
We've had the tech to do this for years. Maybe nobody had the idea, maybe they tried it and it didn't work, but training an LLM to even approach competence at this task would be way more effort than just making an expert system, and wouldn't work as well.