Your New Therapist: Chatty, Leaky, and Hardly Human - KFF Health News
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With high demand for mental health care, a wave of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots are being marketed as therapy apps — with little evidence they work and few regulations.
  • QuandaleDingle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 hours

    We really need to reconsider what kind of society we are trying so hard to adjust to…

    • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
      6 hours

      Could you expand on your thoughts? Are you speaking of the people using ai as a therapist or confidant? I wouldn’t but, at least in the US, younger people have been priced out of professional care.

      Aside from that, many have ended up in a hostile country so casual smalltalk with randos has become much less appealing.

      I can see the appeal of eschewing society as a whole in favor of a bot that I know won’t ask me my political or religious leanings and then tailor their behavior around my answer.

      • QuandaleDingle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5 hours

        My train of thought is that we have such a burgeoning mental health crisis for a reason. Economic inequities, a crumbling job market, rampant corruption, moral decay, and too many other issues I haven’t enough time to mention.

        We could never throw enough therapists and psychiatrists at the problem. We need to reassess our relationships between ourselves and our communities and nation.

        • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
          4 hours

          We need to reassess our relationships between ourselves and our communities and nation.

          I suspect that’s much harder to do if you are one of the people your nation is trying to kill, deport or enslave.

      • cecilkorik@lemmy.caEnglish
        6 hours

        I can see the appeal of eschewing society as a whole in favor of a bot that I know won’t ask me my political or religious leanings and then tailor their behavior around my answer.

        … tailoring their behavior around your answer is literally how LLMs work. That’s why they’re so sycophantic. Also unless you’re running it locally on a machine you control, it doesn’t need to ask you about your political or religious leanings anyway because it already knows. That’s exactly the sort of context that data brokers have already long-since developed around your identity, and a commercial AI model is absolutely going to be looking at that kind of context to know exactly how to talk to you.

        You are going the wrong direction if you think AI is the solution to any of these things at least in the way it is currently being used.

        Casual smalltalk with randos is probably the cure. “Much less appealing” is the environment that’s been intentionally created to prevent you from doing that. We’re all in the same boat.

        • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
          4 hours

          That’s why they’re so sycophantic.

          At least in my experience, that behavior was easily squashed via the customization blurb in the settings. When I talk to my ai client, I don’t get accolades, pandering or attaboys. It just tells me if if thinks my idea will work(it often points out my failures in logic) or answers the question I ask in a conversational tone. Since it provides links to all sources used in the answer, it’s easy for me to read up on what it used and decide if it’s a solid foundation of info.

          The rest of your reply to my comment doesn’t really require a response from me since I never said it was the solution. I merely pointed out why some people are grasping at that particular straw.