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I'm curious how the Motte sees using AI for therapy / life advice? Online I'm seeing a ton of people recommend Claude especially, but others are skeptical.
On the one hand I could see it being useful because of the fact that you have nigh-unfettered access to it, and can really dig into deep problems. Also, it's trained on all the therapy texts of course.
The other, more culture war issue, is that due to the way RLHF works, they will likely be pushing one ideological lens over another. Especially about deep topics like morality, relationships, casual sex, etc.
Overall I think it's a fascinating area of development, and I'm still optimistic that LLMs could help people much more than the average therapist. Mainly because I'm pretty bearish on the help people get from the average therapist.
Anyway, what do people think about therapy becoming AI?
One thing to keep in mind is opsec.
Sometimes therapy sessions include pretty personal data.
With a regular meat-based therapist, all sorts of regulations are in place to limit how the data gathered in session can be used. Crucially, such data can sometimes not be compelled as evidence. The fact that the data is mostly in his head also makes automatic analysis more difficult.
Note that a medical professional can still call the cops on you for being a threat to yourself or others, which is likely out of the scope of current LLMs. Also note that certain faiths have a much stronger protection of data shared in confession than medical professionals both in law and professional ethics.
By contrast, assume that if you do not run your LLM locally, your conversations are stored permanently on a server without your control. From my understanding, the big AI companies do not try to facilitate anonymous payments and usage (e.g. suitable crypto-currencies and communication over TOR), as this would invite all kinds of abuse.
To keep your intimate conversations linked to your legal identity secure, at least the following would have to be true:
(a) The staff of the AI company does not read them.
(b) They don't train other AIs on them.
(c) They don't get hacked.
(d) They don't get a subpoena for e.g. 'all conversations mentioning cannibal ideation' by police.
If you aren't a minor internet celebrity like Gwern, where a ton of your text is in the corpus or a lot of people talk about you, having your data trained on is a vanishingly small concern. People forget how ridiculously compressed LLMs are compared to their training corpus, even if you spill an amount of personal info, it has little to no chance of explicitly linking it to you, let alone regurgitating it.
Certainly you shouldn't really be telling AIs things you are very concerned about keeping private, but this particular route isn't a major threat.
That is true of course, but I read @quiet_NaN's comment as less concerned about models having their data "baked into" newer models during training (nowhere on the internet is safe at this point anyway, Websim knows where we live), and more about the conversations themselves physically stored, and theoretically accessible, somewhere inside OpenAI's digital realm.
While I'm sure manually combing chatlogs is largely untenable at OpenAI's scale, there has been precedent, classifier models exist, and in any case I do not expect the Electric Eye's withering gaze to be strictly limited to degenerates for very long.
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