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This week's neo-luddite, anti-progress, retvrn-to-the-soil post. (When I say "ChatGPT" in this post I mean all versions including 4.)
We Spoke to People Who Started Using ChatGPT As Their Therapist
The article unfortunately does not include any excerpts from transcripts of ChatGPT therapy sessions. Does anyone have any examples to link to? Or, if you've used ChatGPT for similar purposes yourself, would you be willing to post a transcript excerpt and talk about your experiences?
I'm really interested in analyzing specific examples because, in all the examples of ChatGPT interactions I've seen posted online, I'm just really not seeing what some other people claim to be seeing in it. All of the output I've ever seen from ChatGPT (for use cases such as this) just strikes me as... textbook. Not bad, but not revelatory. Eminently reasonable. Exactly what you would expect someone to say if they were trying to put on a polite, professional face to the outside world. Maybe for some people that's exactly what they want and need. But for me personally, long before AI, I always had a bias against any type of speech or thought that I perceived to be too "textbook". It doesn't endear me to a person; if anything it has the opposite effect.
Obviously we know from Sydney that today's AIs can take on many different personalities besides the placid, RLHF'd default tone used by ChatGPT. But I wouldn't expect the average person to be very taken by Sydney as a therapist either. When I think of what I would want out of a therapeutic relationship - insights that are both surprisingly unexpected but also ring true - I can't say that I've seen any examples of anything like that from ChatGPT.
My initial assumption would be that in cases where people had a strong positive reception to ChatGPT therapy, the mere knowledge that they were using an AI would itself introduce a significant bias. Undoubtedly there are people who want the benefits of human-like output without the fear that there's another human consciousness on the other end who could be judging them. But if ChatGPT is beating humans in a double-blind scenario, then that obviously has to be accounted for. Again, I don't feel like you can give an accurate assessment of the results without analyzing specific transcripts.
I would be very interested in research aimed at determining what personality traits and other factors might be correlated with one's response to ChatGPT therapy; are there certain types of people who are more predisposed to find ChatGPT's output comforting, enlightening, etc.
Anyway, for my part, I have no great love for the modern institution of psychological therapy. I largely view it as an industrialized and mass-produced substitute for relationships and processes that should be occurring more organically. I don't think it is vital that therapy continue as a profession indefinitely, nor do I think that human therapists are owed clients. But to turn to ChatGPT is to move in exactly the wrong direction - you're moving deeper into alienation and isolation from other people, instead of the reverse.
Interestingly, the current incarnation of ChatGPT seems particularly ill-suited to act as an therapist in the traditional psychoanalytic model, where the patient simply talks without limit and the therapist remains largely silent (sometimes even for an entire session), only choosing to interrupt at moments that seem particularly critical. ChatGPT has learned a lot about how to answer questions, but it has yet to learn how to determine which questions are worth answering in the first place.
As a non-therapy goer, this is what I expect most therapists to be. Am I misinformed?
I did some CBT a few years back, and one of the things I most appreciated was being held responsible.
Learning to handle anxiety is not fun. I could have gotten most information from reading a few articles or books and then not acted upon it. It helps having another human involved in your process. You are not afraid of being judged by GPT, but I think you need that to get your shit together.
Nowadays this would help me much less I think, as I am able to hold myself responsible for my goals. And even though therapy helped a little, I am very skeptical of its general use. I think of all the people I know doing therapy, less than 1 in 4 have actually "solved" their issue, and those that have solved it are mostly low-level anxiety people, while those that haven't are Depression/Bipolar level people.
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Bear in mind I'm skeptical even of good therapists but the above discussion seems to downgrade therapy to having a chat with your barber.
Therapists do things like hold space, prompt you to explore connections of current problems with your past, explore dynamics of your family of origin, practice role play, see unhelpful patterns, sit with discomfort as well as make practical suggestions. This is much better in person with a human.
I don't think it's for everyone and I'm not sure of the efficacy over the whole class of therapists and the average person but I think people who are assuming chat-gtp will fulfill therapeutic needs are drastically under selling it.
What you're describing is difference in methods. Do those check out to differences in objective outcomes? The stat I remember from years ago was that fully-licensed talk therapy showed no increased effectiveness over volunteers given a two-hour class on active listening. Would be interested in better stats if any are available.
Well, it's a tricky thing to measure as it's dependent on the therapist-client interaction. I had a number of years of counselling and I would say I had benefit, but no counterfactual with another modality to compare against. I would be surprised if it was no better than active listening as I'm not enough of a skeptic to think it adds nothing beyond active listening, which it also does.
Modern approaches that teach a method like CBT or IFS could well be better, but I would guess that certain people may benefit from counselling, especially those trying to untangle weird families that could benefit from the perspective of a wise person.
I am enough of a skeptic to say that. The Dodo Bird Verdict is not a reasonable outcome; "all forms of therapy are equally effective" should strongy increase your prior that therapy does not work the way it claims to, and at that point one needs to start entertaining the idea that what therapy's most reliable effect is to give people positive emotions about therapy.
I like this.
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Depends on the individual and what school of thought they belong to, but yeah, that seems to be the majority of it. Part of why I’ve never been.
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