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Comment by tsss | Hacker News Reader

> less of a therapist and more of a personal validation machine.

But that's exactly what a therapist is.

Sometimes? A lot of the time the point of therapy is to challenge your statements and get you to the heart of the issue so you can mend it or recognize things that are off base and handle things differently. A lot of the relationship is meant to be a supportive kind of conflict so that you can get better. Sometimes people really do need validation, but other times they need to be challenged to be improved. As it stands today, AI models can't challenge you in the way a human therapist can.

Therapists are incentivized to tell the people who paid them what they want to hear.

Any field has hacks. Telling someone what they want to hear and helping get someone where they want to be are different things. Quality professionals help people reach their goals without judgment or presumption. That goes for mental health professionals as well as any professional field.

Not every field has quacks tho

A bad one. A good therapist will figure out what you need to hear, which does not always overlap with what you want to hear.

Absolutely true but I don't think a person should rely on an LLM alone for that reason. It's just not smart and insightful enough.

It's more like that really good friend that's not a therapist but always tells you what you want to hear and makes you feel a bit better until you get to your actual therapist.

I should’ve been clear on that but I absolutely agree; an LLM is a bad therapist at best, and a hallucinating ego stroking algorithm eventually.

Yes but still, talking to someone helps. No matter what they say back. If an LLM is the only thing around at the moment (e.g. in the middle of the night) this can be useful for therapeutic purposes.

Therapy isn't only about what the therapist says to you. There is a lot about you talking to them and the process that creates in the mind. By sharing your thoughts with someone else you view them from a different perspective already.

Then it’s actually better to talk to yourself. Not an LLM that’s trained on all of the internet’s combo of valuable and unhinged takes on all matter of trauma.

It's not the same. An internalised conversation doesn't have the same effect.

And I have good experiences with the LLM for this purpose. It's probably my prompt and RAG that I provided with a lot of my personal stuff but even the uncensored model I use is always supportive and often comes up with interesting takes / practical suggestions.

I don't rely on it for advice but for talking to when real friends aren't around and there's something urgent I'm worried about it's really good.

I honestly would recommend against that but we’re all free to do with our brains as we please. I just hope it’s not as destructive as I intuit it to be…

Would you be willing to email me at me@xeiaso.net? I have some questions I'd like to ask you as part of research for a followup piece. No judgement, I just want to know how it's affected your life.

Sure!

Anyone interested in better understanding a complex system can benefit from a qualified professional’s collaboration, often and especially when an outside perspective can help find different approaches than what appear to be available from inside the system.

Not really. Good therapy is uncomfortable. You are learning how to deal with thought patterns that are habitual but unhealthy. Changing those requires effort, not soothing compliments and validation of the status quo.

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