Comment by rubslopes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubslopes | Hacker News Reader

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A bit of a counterpoint. I've done 3 years of therapy with an amazing professional. I can't exaggerate how much good it did; I'm a different person, I'm not an anxious person anymore. I think I have a good idea of how good human therapy is. I was discharged about 2 years ago.

Last Saturday, I was a little distressed about a love-hate relationship that I have with one of the things that I work with, so I tried using AI as a therapist. Within 10 minutes of conversation, the AI gave me some incredible insight. I was genuinely impressed. I had already discussed this same subject with two psychologist friends, who hadn't helped much.

Moreover: I needed to finish a report that night and I told the AI about it. So it said something like, "I see you're procrastinating preparing the report by talking to me. I'll help you finish it."

And then, in the same conversation, the AI switched from psychologist to work assistant and helped me finish the report. And the end product was very good.

I was left very reflective after this.

Edit: It was Claude Sonnet 4.5 with extended thinking, if anyone is wondering.

You're allowing yourself to think of it like a person, which is a scary risk. A person, it is not.

You learned skills your trained therapist guided you to develop over a three year period of professional interaction. These skills likely influenced your interaction with this product.

I believe so!

Be careful though, because if I were to listen to Claude Sonnet 4.5, it would have ruined my relationship. It kept telling me how my girlfriend is gaslighting me, manipulating me, and that I need to end the relationship and so forth. I had to tell the LLM that my girlfriend is nice, not manipulative, and so on, and it told me that it understands why I feel like protecting her, BUT this and that.

Seriously, be careful.

At the same time, it has been useful for the relationship at other times.

You really need to nudge it in the right direction and do your due diligence.

That would be all the Reddit "AmIOverreacting" in training data... :/

I had a similar thing throughout last week dealing with relationship anxiety and I used that same model for help. It really did provide great insight into managing my emotions at the time, provided useful tactics to manage everything and encouraged me to see my therapist. You can ask it to play devil's advocate or take on different viewpoints as a cynic or use Freudian methodology, etc... You can really dive into an issue you're having and then have it give you the top three bullet points to talk with your therapist about.

This does require you think about what it's saying though and not taking it at surface value since it obviously lacks what makes humans human.

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